The Oldie magazine - August 2022 - issue 416 by The Oldie

MARTIN JARVIS ON THE FORSYTE SAGA ROGER LEWIS ON THE CELTS

‘You are as old as you feel’ – HM the Queen August 2022 | £4.95 £3.96 to subscribers | www.theoldie.co.uk | Issue 416

Goodbye, Norma Jeane My last day with Marilyn Monroe – Nicky Haslam Jolly Philip Larkin – A N Wilson Unity Mitford, my new neighbour – Laurence Marks Tories at war – Sir Les Patterson

Save when you subscribe – and get two free books See page 11

Jolly Philip Larkin page 24

Features 11 Farewell to understatement Oliver Pritchett 14 Forsyte Saga revisited Martin Jarvis 18 Marilyn Monroe’s last photos Nicky Haslam 20 My personal organiser Elinor Goodman 22 We bought a Welsh castle David James 24 My larks with Larkin A N Wilson 27 On being buried with the Mitfords Laurence Marks 29 The perils of a weak bladder Ysenda Maxtone Graham 30 Painting for the Palio Emma Sergeant 31 Fake news Piers Pottinger 32 My love affair with cricket Dick Clement 34 Stop grousing about shooting Jamie Blackett 36 Pretty girls Frances Wilson

Regulars 5 The Old Un’s Notes 9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary 10 Grumpy Oldie Man Matthew Norman 13 Olden Life: What were eye miniatures? Deborah Nash

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ABC circulation figure January-June 2021: 49,181

The artist and the bishop page 30

The unexpected Roald Dahl page 48

13 Modern Life: What is the summer of discontent? Richard Godwin 26 Mary Killen’s Fashion Tips 35 Small World Jem Clarke 37 The biggest column in Fleet Street Sir Les Patterson 38 Town Mouse Tom Hodgkinson 39 Country Mouse Giles Wood 40 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny 41 School Days Sophia Waugh 41 Quite Interesting Things about ... teeth John Lloyd 42 God Sister Teresa 42 Memorial Service: Sir Nicholas Goodison James Hughes-Onslow 43 The Doctor’s Surgery Theodore Dalrymple 44 Readers’ Letters 46 I Once Met… Terry Wogan Christopher Winn 46 Memory Lane Susan Bond 59 Media Matters Stephen Glover 60 History David Horspool 63 Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond 63 Rant: Complicated car keys Sharon Griffiths 89 Crossword 91 Bridge Andrew Robson

91 Competition Tessa Castro 98 Ask Virginia Ironside

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Jonathan Anstee Supplements editor Liz Anderson Editorial assistant Donna Freed Publisher James Pembroke Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

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Books 48 Roald Dahl: Teller of the Unexpected, by Matthew Dennison 51 The Celts: A Sceptical History, by Simon Jenkins Roger Lewis 53 British Traitors: Betrayal and Treachery in the Twentieth Century, by Gordon Kerr Mary Kenny 53 Beware of the Bull: The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray, by Paul Thompson and John Watterson Benedict Nightingale 54 Henrietta Maria: Conspirator, Warrior, Phoenix Queen, by Leanda de Lisle Paul Lay 57 Survey of London: Whitechapel, Volumes 54 and 55, by Peter Guillery Jeremy Musson

Arts 64 Film: McEnroe Harry Mount 65 Theatre: Bugsy Malone William Cook 65 Radio Valerie Grove 66 Television Frances Wilson 67 Music Richard Osborne

68 Golden Oldies Rachel Johnson 69 Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Pursuits 71 Gardening David Wheeler 71 Kitchen Garden Simon Courtauld 72 Cookery Elisabeth Luard 72 Restaurants James Pembroke 73 Drink Bill Knott 74 Sport Jim White 74 Motoring Alan Judd 76 Digital Life Matthew Webster 76 Money Matters Margaret Dibben 79 Bird of the Month: Razorbill John McEwen

Travel 80 Art in the Middle East Justin Doherty 82 Overlooked Britain: London’s grand circle, the M25 Lucinda Lambton 85 On the Road: Charles Moore Louise Flind 87 Taking a Walk: East End ramble Patrick Barkham

Literary Lunch National Liberal Club, 4th October p77 Oldie book orders ● Please email bookorders@theoldie.co.uk Advertising For display, contact: Paul Pryde on 020 3859 7095 or Rafe Thornhill on 020 3859 7093 For classified, contact: Jasper Gibbons 020 3859 7096 News-stand enquiries mark.jones@newstrademarketing.co.uk Front cover Collection Christophel / Alamy

The Oldie August 2022 3

The Old Un’s Notes

NEIL SPENCE

The Oldie has made constitutional history! At the Duchess of Cornwall’s 75th-birthday party – hosted by The Oldie, Gyles Brandreth and Joanna Lumley at the National Liberal Club – the Duchess unveiled her plans in her future role as Queen Consort. She said, ‘The Duke of Edinburgh’s philosophy was clear: “Look up and look out, say less, do more – and get on with the job” – and that is just what I intend to do. ‘Both he and Her Majesty have always been the very touchstone of what it truly means to “get on with the job”, and an inspiration to each one of us here to do the same, whatever our age.’ The Duchess also emulated the teasing ways of the late Prince Philip in the opening lines of her speech: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if I’m allowed to call you that, good afternoon.’ The Oldie is happy to take its rightful place in royal history – our archives are open to all constitutional experts in search of hallowed historical documents. The party was held also to celebrate those of the Duchess’s vintage – and even earlier vintages – who still have snap in their celery. And what a dazzling gathering it was. Among the guests were Petula Clark, Jilly Cooper, Tom Courtenay, Jasper Carrot, Jeremy Irons, Trevor McDonald, Hayley

The Living Proof by Roger McGough Speaking as somebody who knows a thing or two About having been your age, let me say this: You have reached a watershed; celebrate the fact. Water is good for you and everybody loves sheds. Oldie Speech: the Duchess, Gyles Brandreth, Joanna Lumley

Mills, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tony Blackburn, Patricia Hodge and Jimmy Tarbuck. Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, gave a toast, recalling Camilla the bellatrix, the warrior princess in Virgil’s Aeneid.

Willard White led a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday. Penelope Keith recited one of the Duchess’s favourite poems, Matilda, by Hilaire Belloc. And Roger McGough read a poem he’d composed for the Duchess (see right).

Among this month’s contributors Martin Jarvis (p14) has been the voice of Just William since 1973. He’s recorded 195 of Richmal Crompton’s stories. He’s played Jeeves on Broadway. In this issue, he writes of his role in The Forsyte Saga (1967). Nicky Haslam (p18) is a writer, singer and interior designer. He is the author of Sheer Opulence and a memoir, Redeeming Features. He performs songs by Cole Porter, an old friend of his. Laurence Marks (p27) and Maurice Gran are among Britain’s greatest screenwriters. They wrote Shine on Harvey Moon, The New Statesman, Birds of a Feather and Goodnight Sweetheart. Emma Sergeant (p30) won the National Portrait Gallery Award and was the official artist with Prince Charles on his overseas trips. She writes in this issue about painting the banner at the Siena Palio.

Yours are the days, ma’am, with the promise Of many more ahead. So carpe diem, But gently, for that way they last longer And don’t count them. Just be grateful. In fact, days can be surprisingly perfect, Arriving fully formed when least expected. A chance meeting may be involved; a compliment Out of the blue. You make somebody laugh. The earth need not move; no call for Fanfares and fireworks. The perfect day Can be as ordinary as a stroll by the river; As simple as the absence of bad news. Happy to push yourself well within your limits, Take no for an answer and suffer fools gladly. Content at last in the knowledge That you are the living proof of yourself.

The Oldie August 2022 5

NEIL SPENCE

Important stories you may have missed Goole man returns library book his mum borrowed 76 years ago Hull Daily Mail Depp seen cuddling a badger in Kent i

Mango chutney thief comes very close to jail sentence Cornwall Live £15 for published contributions

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Golden oldies at the party: Leslie Caron and Roger McGough; Noddy Holder; Twiggy, Felicity Kendal, Roy Palmer and the Duchess; Penelope Keith; Nigel Havers and Siân Phillips

Simon Jenkins, the writer and former Times editor, summed up the very jolly occasion best: ‘They say that, at the end, you see all your life stream past: the stages, the friends, the incidents. The Oldie is the embodiment of that truth, and the lunch the embodiment of The Oldie.’ Novelist and playwright Michael Frayn has revealed how he first discovered the artist J M W Turner as a bloodynosed schoolboy. ‘I suffered from bad catarrh

in my early teens and was seeing a Harley Street surgeon, who used what felt like a hammer and tongs to make holes in my sinuses,’ says the 88-year-old playwright and novelist. ‘So I’d pop down to the National Gallery afterwards and walk around with a bloodfilled nose while the anaesthetic was wearing off.’ Frayn was speaking at the opening of a new exhibition of the artist’s work, Between the Sheets: Turner’s Nudes – showcasing his female nudes – at Turner’s House in

Twickenham. He added, ‘Ironically the surgery didn’t work, but at least I got to discover Turner and the other impressionists at an early age.’ Jenny Agutter’s admission (July issue) that she can’t leave home without a pillow would have struck a chord with Evelyn Waugh. Recalling the fall of Crete in 1941, when he never fired a shot in anger despite being at the sharp end, Waugh said his most valuable piece of equipment in action was a pillow.

Boris Johnson’s fall has been documented in the language he understands best – Latin. At Westminster School’s Election Dinner at the end of the summer term, they’ve recited topical Latin epigrams for centuries. The art is to use only Latin words but produce English-sounding puns. So Bijan Omrani, a former Westminster classics teacher and author of Caesar’s Footprints, wrote the following epigram as the Tory leadership raged. The English pun words are in capitals: NOnne SAGITta RESIdit nunc funesta Dianae? ArBORIS in ramis EXITiosa manent! In other words, the English-sounding bits of the epigram read, ‘No Sajid, Rishi? Ah, Boris – exit!’ And Omrani translates the Latin like this: ‘Do the gods still press on us their deadly rage? ‘For sure – while we all linger in this bar-boris [barbarous] craze.’ Ever fancied exploring London’s historic – and, erm, sometimes rather dingy – alleyways, from Magpie Alley to Matrimony Place? Well, now’s your chance. Niche mapmaker Blue Crow Media has just published the London Alleyways Map (£9). The author, Matthew Turner, explains how these ancient narrow thoroughfares – or gullies, gunnels and snickets, as they are also known – are a window on the past.

‘They echo the routes of trade, lost rivers, disputed boundaries and the tracks of urban animals,’ he says. ‘They are also the entry point to more hidden parts of the city – that second metropolis hiding between and under the everyday.’ The map lists more than 50 London alleys, with charming names such as Wardrobe Place and Nursemaids’ Tunnel – built so that maids walking with their charges didn’t have to cross Euston Road. The book reveals the location (Warwick House Street) of the fictional mysterious MI6 task-force office in the hit TV show Killing Eve. And Turner tracks down the narrowest alley in the capital, Emerald Court – a mere 26 inches wide. Breathe in! The armed forces are crammed with eccentric mascots, from rams to goats. But a skunk? That’s the animal David Gunn bought to accompany him on board HMS Saintes, when he was commissioned as a naval officer more than 60 years ago. In his new memoir, Mr Hitler Missed Me (Helion), Gunn recalls his fondness for the skunk, which he christened Alphonse. It caused such a stir that he was photographed by the press near Buckingham Palace (pictured). ‘Stinker signs on,’ read one headline.

‘For starters, the sales kiosk should be at the entrance...’

Navy lark: Gunn’s skunk

Gunn gives a handy tip to any prospective skunkowners: ‘If you keep a nocturnal animal such as a skunk, it wants to be awake and active when you are asleep, and asleep when you are awake. ‘In Alphonse’s case, this did not matter as, at sea, watches were kept on the bridge every night so that he had the company of sailors for whom he was a constant source of interest. One delicacy he relished were the cockroaches that thrived once we reached warmer seas.’ Any nocturnal readers with cockroaches in their kitchen? You have found the ideal pet. In a new book, Nicholas Allan walks round the former Yugoslavia in the steps of Rebecca West in her book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). At Mount Avala, Serbia, Allan came across the wonderfully odd 1938 Monument to the Unknown

Hero by the Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović (1883-1962). It had been commissioned by King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, assassinated in 1934 on the streets of Marseille. The assassination was one of the first ever to be recorded on film. ‘When West visited,’ Allan writes, ‘it was still under construction. She admired the calm peasant women on whose heads the roof was supported.’ Those peasant women were modelled on the caryatids at the fifth-centuryBC Erechtheion temple by the Parthenon in Athens. They in turn were inspired by the women of Caryae in Sparta, enslaved after betraying Athens and siding with Persia. The Athens caryatids, like these lovely ladies, are decidedly chunky. But then again you’d have to be to hold up a temple for nearly 2,500 years.

Support role: Serb caryatids The Oldie August 2022 7

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

The ups and downs of Boris Johnson Did he crash and burn because of manic depression?

Someone who should know – someone who was once very senior at Number Ten – told me, more than two years ago, that Boris Johnson’s premiership was bound to end in tears. ‘Why’s that?’ I asked. Given that Boris had just secured a thumping big majority in the 2019 general election, it seemed a bit unlikely at the time. ‘Because he’s a manic depressive,’ said my man. ‘He’s bipolar.’ It’s an interesting suggestion – and entirely speculative, as far as I know – but, if true, explains a lot about the behaviour of our fallen hero. In the early months of his premiership, there were days when Boris disappeared from view. Were these the lows? And at the end of his reign – holed up in Downing Street, refusing to see the writing on the wall, declaring he planned to rule until 2030, hiring (and firing) ministers with gay abandon while his administration was in free-fall – was this a man on a manic high that robbed him of his reason? If so, and I speak as someone with a streak of bipolar disorder in his own family, it increases my sympathy and liking for our departing prime minister. Another reason that I have a soft spot for Bojo is that we are both past presidents of the Oxford Union – and were both defeated for the post when we first stood for election. From Gladstone to Johnson, the Oxford Union (200 years old next year and still the world’s best-known university debating society) boasts an impressive roll-call of prime ministers among its former officers. One such was Edward Heath, Union President in 1939, and the prime minister who took us into the European Union in 1973, 47 years before Boris took us out. Heath’s ashes are interred in Salisbury Cathedral, 100 yards from Arundells, his handsome house in the cathedral close. I visited both last month when chairing an event that honoured Heath’s memory and the lifetime achievement of Kenneth Clarke,

Highs and lows

former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Education Secretary, Health Secretary, Home Secretary, Lord Chancellor and, by most people’s reckoning, one of the best prime ministers we never had. Lord Clarke, 82, was in robust form intellectually, but told us this was his last public outing. He has a bad back and can’t stand for more than a minute or two without being in considerable pain. He remembered Heath as being socially awkward but fundamentally decent – and, like Ken himself, of course, passionate about Europe. I was lucky enough to be entertained by Ted Heath at Arundells on a number of occasions. He was a generous host. ‘Have a cigar,’ he would say, after lunch. ‘Fidel gave me those. He sends a box every Christmas.’ Heath was an admirer of Fidel Castro. And Chairman Mao. Of Margaret Thatcher, his successor as leader of the Conservative Party, less so. In fact, to the end of his days, he did his utmost to avoid hearing or mentioning her name. I asked him about the secret of being a successful prime minister. ‘The great leaders will always concentrate on the big picture,’ Ted told me. ‘Not get too bogged down in the day-to-day. I remember, in the middle of one crisis [in 1958, when Heath was Chief Whip] − three ministers, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had just resigned − I went to see Macmillan in his room at Number Ten to talk to him about the timing of the announcement of their

replacements. I found him sitting in his armchair with his feet up on a stool, reading in front of the fire. He agreed to what I proposed and then said, “But please don’t worry me any more. Can’t you see that I’m trying to finish Dombey and Son before I go off on this foreign tour tomorrow morning?” ’ ‘Would that approach be possible today?’ I asked Ted. ‘Yes, perfectly. It was that approach that allowed me my music, my concerts. It allowed me my sailing in the spring and the summer.’ ‘When did that style of government begin to change?’ ‘With Harold Wilson. He was a workaholic.’ Once, playfully, determined to get Ted to spit out the name of the woman who succeeded him as leader of the Conservative Party, I asked him to list for me the ten prime ministers since the war he admired the most. ‘Present company excepted?’ he enquired, shoulders heaving. His list began with Winston Churchill, followed by Harold Macmillan and Clement Attlee. He spoke not unkindly of his pipe-smoking political adversary Harold Wilson, and reasonably well of John Major and Tony Blair. He even found something to commend in the premierships of Anthony Eden and James Callaghan. ‘That’s eight,’ I said. ‘Can you think of a couple more?’ ‘Alec Douglas-Home was very underrated,’ he said. ‘A thoroughly decent man.’ ‘And in tenth place on your list of most impressive prime ministers since the war?’ I persisted. Without a moment’s pause he replied, ‘I think the current prime minister of Belgium is quite impressive, don’t you?’ Gyles Brandreth’s memoir, Odd Boy Out, is out now (Penguin) The Oldie August 2022 9

Grumpy Oldie Man

Hung out to dry on the phone line

I tried to cancel a TV subscription – and lost the will to live matthew norman Where do you stand on the matter of coincidence? God and Albert Einstein famously didn’t believe in it, the latter describing it as the former’s way of staying anonymous. But, much as I respect both chaps, I find myself horribly conflicted. What provoked the confusion is a recent divorce from Virgin Media. The economic vista having developed not necessarily to my advantage – and despite my relishing the kindly invitation to pay £165 per month for a broadband and cable TV package available to new customers for seven and sixpence farthing – sacrifices must be made. Now experience counsels that no phone call to Virgin Media should be undertaken lightly. It should never be attempted, in fact, without the prophylactic ingestion of 10mg of diazepam and several fingers of malt whisky. A coma or death is a small price to pay (not words that come naturally in the VM context) to deaden the pain. Shockingly, the call was answered by the usual recorded message warning of ‘an unusually high volume of calls’ and ‘longer than usual’ delays. The ensuing 63 minutes were strangely unleavened by 14 renditions of Eurovision runner-up Space Man. But an equally insistent recorded message advocating the use of the website instead was very sweet. Who wants to hang on long enough to grow a ZZ Top beard when everything can be done swiftly online? And yet it transpires that there is one thing that even the mighty Virgin Media website cannot facilitate. That solitary thing is… But why ruin the fun? Take a moment for a guess. The only thing you cannot do on the website – the one recommended time and again to those calling to cancel a contract – is this: you cannot cancel a contract. 10 The Oldie August 2022

Is this a coincidence? Was it also coincidence that, after I had finally reached one human voice, and then waited a further 25 minutes to be transferred to another, the line went dead 2.37 seconds before the cancellation could be completed? What I do know is this. Regardless of any trivial failings in customer service, you have to admire Virgin Media’s cleaving to tradition. It took a while to become alerted to the digital tech firm’s charmingly incongruous love of nostalgia. Not least because, in keeping with the Einsteinian definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result), I made a second call. This one cut out, unanswered, after a refreshing 64 minutes of Space Man, alternating with directions to the website. It is here that I must offer some advice. In circumstances such as these, ring the press office. There’s no need to lie. You needn’t claim to have won a Pulitzer. Merely tell them that you are eager – as you will be – to warn the public to avoid the company as if it were bathed in the lambent glow of a uranium rod newly removed from the main reactor at Chernobyl. So it was that a nice press officer called Luke, deeply regretting the ‘unfortunate accidents’ with the calls, roused a colleague to effect the cancellation. If the contract terminates on a certain day, said Lynnette, I’d be due a refund of 45 quid. ‘That’s tremendous,’ I said. ‘So you’ll transfer it to my bank account.’

‘Surely you can transfer money to an account from which you have taken it?’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Lynnette. ‘It will be returned by way of a cheque.’ ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘My hearing’s not all that. Did you say a cheque?’ A cheque, confirmed Lynnette, was precisely what she’d said. After recovering from the paroxysm, I asked why Virgin Media would go to the bother of issuing and posting a cheque when it could send the money in exactly the same way that it takes it. Lynnette wasn’t sure. Now it’s not that any of us lacks affection for nostalgia. Being British, we can seldom escape the sense that things were better when we were huddling from the Luftwaffe on tube platforms, singing about hanging out the washing on the Siegfried Line and fretting about our children’s rickets. For all that, I went on, and not to spoil the fun, surely you have the ability to transfer money to an account from which you have, for more than a decade, taken it? ‘Sadly,’ said Lynnette, ‘this cannot be done.’ I remain racked by indecision as to whether it is an exquisitely cunning ruse, or some recherché form of coincidence, that a firm priding itself on its hyperspeed digital communication chooses to delay the process by several weeks (or several months, given the unpredictability of the second-class post). God and Einstein could easily calculate how much the company pockets a year by clinging to its customers’ money. My best guess is enough to make it worthwhile. As I write, meanwhile, a ping announces the arrival of the daily email. ‘Reminder’ reads the subject line. ‘The Virgin Media team would like to hear your feedback.’ For old times’ sake, and out of respect for the company’s faith in tragically outmoded technology, it feels seemliest to do that in print.

Oliver Pritchett mourns the death of British understatement – it was really quite good

Less was more

must admit there’s a lot to be said for understatement. I would even say (sotto voce) that it is a jolly good thing. The British used to be noted for their stoicism and their gift for understatement, but now our public conversation is overheated, people argue in headline language and there are fusspots all over social media. And, you know, Twitter is a bit of a curate’s egg. What we need is a phrase book, translating modern English into litotes. I have made a start.

It was havoc = It was a poor show.

Expressing emotion

Food

I am passionate about cooking/ growing dahlias/ chiropody = Cooking/ growing dahlias/ chiropody is my hobby.

I am allergic to asparagus/ oregano/ truffle oil = I am not all that fond of asparagus/ oregano/ truffle oil.

I am madly in love with Dolores Spink = I have a soft spot for Dolores Spink.

Mmmmmmmmm = That went down well/ was rather tasty.

She was traumatised = She was rather taken aback.

This is packed with umami = This is moreish.

It was a traumatic experience = It was unsettling.

The wine has a wonderful complex mouthfeel = That was a nice drop.

They are outraged = They are miffed.

Approving of someone or something

That is a blatant lie = Steady on, old chap. Health She was in agony = She had a niggle. I feel like death = I am a bit under the weather. I was rushed to hospital = I had to go to outpatients.

He is a hero = He is a good egg.

Mishaps

He is a superhero = He is a splendid chap.

An absolute scandal = A bit of a hoo-ha.

She is a saint and a genius = She’s a lovely person.

Tragic = Unfortunate. It is iconic = It is quite well known. He is a crook = He is a wee bit iffy. She is an absolute star = She did awfully well. It was a magical occasion = Everyone seemed to have a good time.

She snubbed me = I didn’t catch her eye. Decimated = Reduced.

£13.90

Toxic = Not on.

She was devastated = She was somewhat put out.

He is a charlatan = He is not everyone’s cup of tea.

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Oliver Pritchett worked for the Sunday Telegraph for 40 years

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THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM

what were eye miniatures? Pictures of a single eye were a short-lived category of miniature painting that existed in Europe between 1785 and 1830. Both male and female eyes were depicted, smaller than life-size and often in bejewelled settings, worn as rings, brooches or bracelets, or decorating the lids of snuff boxes and toothpick cases. If contained in a locket, it might be accompanied by a curl of hair. The gemstones adorning the frames stand in sharp contrast to the simplicity of the portrait and carry meanings of innocence, purity, constancy, felicity and protection against misfortune. Fine examples of eye miniatures are found in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum, the Cleveland Museum and the V&A. In her book Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures, Hanneke Grootenboer points to the absence of paintings showing a person wearing an eye miniature. That

what is the summer of discontent? The summer of discontent is the long hot season of industrial action and class war the United Kingdom is set to experience in 2022 – or so the newspapers have concluded. Just to be clear – it hasn’t happened yet. But the combination of an unpopular government, a cost-of-living crisis and a general sense of everything being a bit rubbish makes a summer of political clashes look likely. Rail workers and criminal barristers have already gone on strike over pay and conditions. Doctors, nurses, care workers, refuse-collectors and teachers are said to be considering following suit. All of this might bring back unhappy memories for those Oldie-readers who remember the original winter of discontent. This happened in 1471 when Edward IV took the English throne back

implies they kept the object of their affection secret. The eye that launched the craze in England was created by Richard Cosway for the future George IV. In 1784, the 21-year-old prince met the newly widowed Maria Fitzherbert at the opera and was immediately smitten. The Royal Marriage Act of 1772 prevented him from marrying the Catholic widow. Still, he tried to push through the union by allegedly selfharming with a knife. Mrs Fitzherbert fled to the Continent. The prince persuaded her to return with his letter and his eye portrait. On 15th December 1785, the couple were wed in a clandestine union that was wholly illegal.

The bride later gifted to the prince her own eye painting, also by Cosway. Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton were known to have exchanged eye miniatures. In 1804, at least eight members of the Beauchamp family had their eyes painted. Queen Victoria continued the practice in 1840 and 1850, when she commissioned court miniaturist Sir William Charles Ross to capture the eyes of her children, friends and relatives. In France, where eye miniatures may have originated from the painted buttons on tailcoats, the trend had more sinister overtones. During the Revolution, the supreme eye of reason appeared in a triangle on the front of the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), which espoused equal sight for all, but became emblematic of surveillance. Eyes featured on passports and on the belts and buckles of the state police, denoting watchfulness to those who were out of step with the political ideals of the time. The advent of photography created an alternative means of immortalising a loved one, and the eye miniature fell into obscurity. Yet its power as a window to the soul and a charming curiosity endures. Deborah Nash

from his resentful brother, Richard III, who grumbled about it at length in the Shakespeare play: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York…’ Edward IV’s father was Duke of York – thus the play on words. The phrase ‘winter of discontent’ was used by the then Sun editor Larry Lamb to describe the miserable winter of 1978/79. Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan struggled to deal with a stagnant economy; bins piled up on frozen streets. Margaret Thatcher lamented the loss of ‘our common nationhood and even of common humanity’. After her victory in the 1979 election, Labour duly spent the next 18 years in opposition. Boris Johnson has sought to revive these Conservative folk memories. The Sun warned of ‘chaos not seen since the 1970s’. Transport Secretary Grant Shapps tried to blame the RMT walkouts on Labour, which was strange, since (a) Labour hasn’t been in power for 12 years and (b) Keir Starmer refused to support

the strikers, much to the disgruntlement of many party members. Mick Lynch, the plain-talking boss of the RMT union, emerged with his reputation enhanced – particularly among the young, amazed to hear an authentic working-class accent on the news. By common consensus, Lynch came across rather well in his tour of the TV studios. Then again, he did tell Richard Madeley he was talking ‘codswallop’, which is usually a winning move. With the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, Brexit and four decades of low wage growth, almost everyone is feeling the pinch. How will things develop? Inflation is expected to hit 11 per cent. Johnson’s government seems short of ideas. Workers are burned out. Beyoncé has released a single railing against the evils of capitalism. And political anger tends to spill out onto the streets in the summer rather than the winter. So buckle up! Or, rather, don’t, given the cost of fuel these days. Richard Godwin

Georgian eye miniature at the V&A

The Oldie August 2022 13

A century after John Galsworthy published The Forsyte Saga, Martin Jarvis remembers his big break

Forsyte family man

BBC

omebody asked me the other day, ‘Were you the callow young man in The Forsyte Saga all those years ago?’ ‘’Fraid so.’ Autumn 1966. Dingy Acton rehearsal hall. I counted my lucky stars. There they all were: the formidable Forsytes. Nyree Dawn Porter, Eric Porter, Margaret Tyzack, Susan Hampshire and life-andsoul Kenneth More. Known as Kenny. The series was an adaptation of John

Galsworthy’s sequence of novels, first published under the name The Forsyte Saga a century ago, in 1922. The press and public were predicting this glittering assembly of actors would change the face of BBC television. I doubted I would be much help. I had somehow secured the substantial role of Jon Forsyte, Kenny’s son. All, except Susan Hampshire and me, had already recorded 12 episodes. As Fleur and Jon, we were the new

generation. We would film for programmes on 26 Sunday nights, broadcast from January 7 to July 1, 1967. Kenny More as ‘Young Jolyon’ Forsyte was the resident film star – not perhaps as blithe as I remembered him in Genevieve and Reach for the Sky. On the second day’s rehearsal, I overheard him berating our director: ‘Don’t bloody tell me what to do, old love. I know cameras. I’ll choose my moments. I’m a RollsRoyce, not a Mini…’

Back row: Sir Lawrence Mont (Cyril Luckham), Michael Mont (Nicholas Pennell), Soames Forsyte (Eric Porter), Jon Forsyte (Martin Jarvis), Val Dartie (Jonathan Burn). Front row: June Forsyte (June Barry), Winifred Dartie (Margaret Tyzack), Fleur Mont (Susan Hampshire), Irene Forsyte (Nyree Dawn Porter), Holly Dartie (Suzanne Neve), Anne Forsyte (Karin Fernald) 14 The Oldie August 2022

EVERETT COLLECTION INC / ALAMY

Matey Eric Porter as Soames Forsyte was really the leading man. I sensed Kenny hadn’t much time for him. When I passed Eric a cup of coffee (‘No sugar, thanks. Nobody loves a fairy when she’s 40’), Kenny darted him a sardonic look and turned away. Kenny did, though, drive Susan Hampshire, Maggie Tyzack and even me to lunch at the Television Centre, squashed into his – um – Mini. At the gates, Kenny was greeted by Vic, at that time possibly the BBC’s sole security man. ‘’Allo there, Mr More – all right, in you go,’ Vic said, raising the barrier and waving us towards the prime parking area designated for screen royalty. Consulting the ‘waitress service’ menu, I knew I couldn’t afford such luxury. Whitebait? ‘Don’t worry,’ Maggie Tyzack muttered about Kenny. ‘He likes to be founder of the feast.’ We were joined by Donald Wilson, our urbane, pipe-smoking producer. I had met him during a day’s pre-filming, embarrassedly standing next to him at the urinal. ‘Have you met your mother yet?’ he’d murmured. ‘Um – ?’ ‘Your mother. Nyree. Playing Irene Forsyte.’ ‘Oh. Not yet.’ ‘Wonderful person, Nyree – er, Irene. Face of an angel. Body of a peasant. You’ll love her, Jon – er, Martin.’ Wilson’s party wall between Forsytes and their actors was paper-thin. It was Wilson who had procured the rights to the Galsworthy books from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. With a proviso: only if the series were shot in black and white. Pity, as the BBC was about to burst into glorious colour. MGM had Technicolor plans of their own. Never fulfilled. When it was suggested that I should try for onscreen billing alongside Susan, my agent approached Donald. She told me afterwards, ‘He was charming – just said, “Leave it to me.” Such a nice man. No problem.’ The billing never materialised. While Kenny held court across the restaurant I chatted shyly to Susan and Maggie Tyzack. Thirty-six-year-old Maggie, as Winifred Dartie, had to seem just 21 in her initial episodes. ‘Tricky, darling – not my bag,’ she confided over the pricey whitebait. ‘I never played 21 when I was 21.’ I could tell Susan Hampshire would be a perfect Fleur Mont. I asked her, ‘The

Above: (From left) Martin Jarvis as Jon Forsyte, Susan Hampshire, Eric Porter. Left: Kenneth More (left) as ‘Young Jolyon’ Forsyte and Eric Porter. Below: Susan Hampshire as Fleur Mont

The Oldie August 2022 15

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Left to right: Nyree Dawn Porter as Irene Forsyte; January 1967 Radio Times front cover; series producer Donald Wilson

way you use your voice in our love scenes, making it so tiny and intimate – how do you do it?’ ‘Easy,’ she replied. ‘It’s how I talk to little children and furry animals.’ Back at rehearsal, I was getting to know the oldies, most of them faces and voices from my childhood viewing: Terence Alexander, John Welsh, Nora Nicholson… All of them were younger than I am now. Somebody once asked a group of us on set, ‘Do you like watching yourself on television?’ Well, my own TV experience was then limited to three productions, one of them as a giant butterfly in a new series called Doctor Who. So I didn’t feel qualified to say much. Affable Terry Alexander enthused, ‘Oh I adore seeing myself. If I’m going to be on, I pour a generous Scotch and pull up a chair. Love it!’ Later I pictured him on Sunday evenings, in front of the screen, having a thoroughly good time watching his superb performance as roguish Monty Dartie. Sue Hampshire was barely older than me. Though wiser. I was staggered to learn that Nyree Dawn Porter was a mere five years my senior. But something about her demeanour made me behave as if she were of an older generation. I’d get up when she entered the rehearsal room, offer her my seat. Couldn’t help it. Was it just because I was playing her son? Hardly. I wasn’t that polite to my real mother. Perhaps a combo of Jon’s unctuous etiquette and Nyree’s gracious manner. Even the long mascara-ed 16 The Oldie August 2022

eyelashes she insisted on wearing onscreen didn’t destroy my illusion. Soon we were in the studio. Episodes were recorded ‘as live’. Continuous action. No stoppages. As few edits as possible to save on budget. In one crucial sequence, having completed a bedroom scene wearing pyjamas and dressing gown, I tore them off at speed, revealing dinner jacket and shirt. Meanwhile, a dresser sprinted beside me, adjusting my bow tie. I hurtled across the studio floor, ducking under cameras, avoiding cables, eventually arriving at the drawing-room set, where Nyree was apparently playing a Chopin nocturne. Leaning casually, heavily, on the piano, breathless but trying not to show it, I gazed into her Mary Quant eyes, gasped and observed, as if I’d been there all the time, ‘Oh that was so lovely, Mother…’ Later, in the BBC Club bar, Nyree whispered, ‘Martin, may I give you a word of advice?’ I nodded. ‘Don’t let them rush you.’ ‘Thank you,’ I said, deferentially, as if she was my own south-London grandma. The series was, as prophesied, enormously successful, though I never felt I deserved my bit of that glory. I was relieved it was transmitted in black and white. My blushes were, to some extent, spared. Over the weeks, I made a few attempts in my battered Ford Anglia to gain entry to the Television Centre parking area. Each time, Vic wearily indicated the quarter-mile trip back up the road, where

parking was available on a rocky piece of land for also-rans such as me. My third episode contained Kenny More’s swan song where his character, ‘Young Jolyon’ Forsyte, collapses and dies. I felt his onscreen wife and son hadn’t quite conveyed the required emotive reaction. But when the studio manager called ‘Cut’ and Kenny rose slowly from his slumped position, it was apparent from his own tears how moved he was at his passing. At the party that followed, Donald Wilson made a silky speech, emphasising, ‘How wonderful for us that Kenny played the leading part.’ I looked around to clock Eric Porter’s reaction. He wasn’t there. When Sue Hampshire’s and my first appearance was transmitted in April 1967, viewers seemed to approve, despite my tuneless warbling of O Who Will O’er the Downs So Free. The series was still so popular that church congregations remained depleted when it was broadcast. Evensong schedules happily accommodated the Jon and Fleur story. Irene Forsyte was marginalised into fewer lines, with a greyer wig, and Nyree’s eyelashes notwithstanding. The next day, I was due at Television Centre. I drove up to the gates once more. Another futile attempt to enter hallowed ground. Vic stepped forward, raising his arm in the familiar gesture. Then stopped. He looked again. ‘’Ere, Forsyte Saga?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You’re a bloody good artist!’ He raised the barrier. ‘In you go!’ he said. I’d arrived. For now.

Sixty years ago, Nicky Haslam, working for Vogue, delivered this dazzling picture to the dazed, haunted star just before she died

My photo opportunity with Marilyn

wo indelible images were engrained in my mid-teen mind. The first was seeing, one blustery June day in 1953, the justcrowned Queen: youthfully pearlescent, sensitive, smiling through rain from that great ornate carriage as she passed, quite close, beside the windows of my father’s club in St James’s. And, not very long after – having hared across those hard-won playing fields of Eton, over lanes and ditches, to the Gaumont in Slough – seeing, in celluloid colour, the world-heralded Marilyn Monroe in There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954). While an afternoon audience of housewives swooned at the gyrations of co-star Johnny Ray, I was enraptured by the sashaying form, the lyre-like arms, the wide luscious mouth, the mouche – the trembling, exquisite being that was Marilyn. These two women, born six weeks but worlds and time and cultures apart, both young, assured and vivacious at so early a milestone in their diverse futures had, at those first coups d’oeil, equal promise of pleasure, security, endurance and a touching similarity in their shimmering white, diamonds and radiance. The Queen recently confided to a friend that she’d rather longed to be an actress had statecraft not been her destiny. But Marilyn had to contend with the pitfalls of actually being an actress in order to become queen of a more calumniatory empire. 18 The Oldie August 2022

Too soon we were to learn of the canker in Marilyn’s crimson rose. Too soon came the revelations of a chaotic upbringing, deeply contorted emotions and betrayed trust. We watched, and wondered, for the next decade, at her sublime beauty, her innate goofiness, the promise of her pout, her glorious gaiety. There was always that nagging feeling that, deep down, almost nothing was right with, or for, her. That, despite the glamour in pink satin, the black monkey fur, the swirling white and the desert-bleached denim, it was all, inevitably, a charade. A few years pass and, while the perfection of her image remains unchanged, one’s heart is in one’s mouth on her behalf. She’s private. She’s ill. She’s late. She’s seeing Peter Lawford; she’ll see only Natasha Lytess, her drama coach. No, she won’t see anyone; she’s a recluse. The nearest I came to her was one sultry Los Angeles summer night. In a bar on Hollywood and Vine, I’d picked up a leathered hunk. Later, lazily, from his Brentwood veranda, he gestured to a one-storey across the street. ‘That’s Marilyn’s.’ He would have known: he was Peggy Lee’s hairdresser. So this was the house, pale and faded

‘Could you take these contacts up to Miss Monroe? And wait while she chooses’

under its dusty greenery, that was to be there for the entire rocky ride, mute witness to the DiMaggio jealousy, the humiliation by Arthur Miller, the ill-fated venture with Milton Greene, the unborn child (by Tony Curtis), the clutches of the Kennedy cabal and reports of fiasco footage on the set of Something’s Gotta Give, her unfinished last film. A couple of Julys later, there’s a conspiratorial but palpably joyous atmosphere in our art department at Vogue in Manhattan. On the lay-out pinboard, among the dedicated editorial pages for the September issue, are 14 starkly white double-page spreads – no hint as to their content. The editors, Diana Vreeland, Alex Liberman and co, buzz around them proudly, congratulatorily, changing the order and shape with sotto voce gestures. Whatever this project is, it’s mammoth. Eventually I find out, and I am sworn to secrecy: the photographer Bert Stern has done a sensational shoot with Marilyn. And, what’s more, she’s agreed to be photographed naked. So she’s all right! She’s back!! On top!!! Everything’s gonna be OK. The contacts come in. Exclaimed, rhapsodised, pored over… Here she is, once again. Glorious, restored, ravishing, the honey-dewed skin, the gold-dust shoulders, the ice-white cowlick, the coral lips quivering. Then someone remembers she has photo approval.

ESTATE OF BERT STERN / GETTY

The last picture show: Haslam handed Marilyn Monroe this Bert Stern photograph weeks before her death on 5th August 1962

There’s a conference, and… ‘Erm, Nicky’ – Priscilla Peck, the art director, is the acme of politesse – ‘Erm, could you, erm, take these up to Miss Monroe?’ I am presented with a heavy white envelope and a red Chinagraph pencil. ‘And please wait while she chooses.’ At 6.30 that evening, I ring the bell of the apartment at 444 East 57th Street. Nothing. I ring again. A small dog barks shrilly; then footsteps. The door opens. The goddess is mere inches from my eyes. But hers are red, her greasy face and smudgy lips framed by lank, lifeless hair. She wears a shapeless grey tracksuit with make-up stains at the

neckline. She looks half-dazed, almost haunted. The dog barks again. ‘Be quiet, Maff,’ she rasps, her hand half-shading her gaze. I hold out the bulging envelope ‘My editor has asked me to…’ ‘Thank you, honey, but I’m running late.’ She half-closes the door, then looks down. ‘Are they OK?’ ‘Yes, they’re wonderful. Of course they’re wonderful. How could they not be?’ ‘Oh, thank you, honey…’ The mascara-messed eyes look up at me, her voice strangely remote. ‘Do you mind if we look at them right here? I’m kinda…’ She opens the envelope and holds each contact sheet against the door, with

the wax crayon expertly and unhesitatingly circling the ones she likes, X-ing others, and, sucking her teeth, puts a pale thumbnail through total rejects. Just as we started on the colour transparencies, a telephone rang, faintly, in a distant room. Marilyn looked panicked. The grubby, unwashed reality gathered up these last images of her golden glory in her arms, thrust them into mine, and ran unsteadily away down the corridor. The dog barked again. The telephone stopped ringing. Marilyn’s door was still open when the elevator arrived. She died three weeks later. The Oldie August 2022 19

My personal organiser Chaotic Elinor Goodman hates admin and forgets passwords. So she called in a professional to clean up her act

he heroine in Deborah Moggach’s latest novel, The Black Dress, is a 70-year-old woman whose husband has recently left her. She discovers she misses not only the companionship and occasional sex, but also his ability to deal with practical tasks such as fixing the central-heating clock and paying the house insurance. So she sets out to find a new man to perform these roles, by going to funerals in the hope of meeting a freshly widowed man before he is snatched up by somebody else. She would have been safer to split the job specification in two. Employ one of the growing breed of personal organisers (PO) to sort out the practical side of her life – and delay the search for a new partner until she has got her act together. In my own experience, the physical loss of separation passes relatively quickly, but the sense of ineptitude does not. As a professional woman, I’m someone you might have thought would be able to cope. Surely, in the 21st century, women should be able to read comparative websites and navigate the internet. But, as political editor of Channel 4 News, I was supported by a string of younger producers, who got me on air every night, despite my total inability to negotiate the computer system and the piles of unfiled cuttings on my desk. When I left Channel 4 News, I realised I needed help. I found myself a PO, who runs a company called Strictly Organised. The name made it sound as if she might be like one of those sadistic people on daytime TV who march into houses overflowing with rubbish and force the poor owner to declutter and get rid of their cats. Sammy turned out not to be bossy. She carried the kind of voluminous handbag I associate with someone who 20 The Oldie August 2022

Queen of Clean: Marie Kondo

can’t throw anything away. In her case, it carried an emergency filing kit. My house wasn’t particularly untidy, but my files were barely existent. I paid the bills by standing order without checking whether I was paying too much. I had paid for my mobile phone several times over. POs – as opposed to declutterers – see their role as not so much to throw things out for you, but to tailor systems to suit a particular client. My particular phobia is passwords, which I unfailingly forget. So she set me up with an electronic system to store them. When I moved house, she arranged the removal company and the parking, dealt with the council and the serviceproviders, produced the necessary figures for my accountant and physically helped me pack up – and, yes, chuck away stuff I didn’t need. After three sessions, I began to feel purified. We now have sessions every six weeks. By no means all POs are for older people. Demand for them among people of working age has grown with the increase in home-working.

Still, as you get older, even if you are not forgetful, you tend to acquire more stuff. Some people get their children to sort them out, but that can strain relationships. Alternatively, some children use organisers to help put together care packages for their parents. In the States, where it all began in the ’80s, POs are big business, with more than 4,000 of them rootling through people’s cupboards. Gwyneth Paltrow has one. She is so pleased with what they achieve together that she invites people to ‘take a peep at her perfect pantry’ online. The most famous tidying-up guru was Marie Kondo. She evangelised on Netflix, and was named one of Time magazine’s most influential people in 2015. Following the success of her TV programme, others followed with names like Horderly ‘for hip hoarders’ and ‘Declutter Darling – the personal trainer for your home’. There is an organisation, based on Alcoholics Anonymous, called Clutterers Anonymous on both sides of the Atlantic. It has a 12-step programme for really serious hoarders, with mental problems over their inability to throw anything away. I would say I was on the spectrum, rather than an acute hoarder. POs took longer to take off as an occupation in this country. It still isn’t a fully fledged profession. Its members aren’t indemnified like accountants or solicitors. But the 400 or so who belong to the Association of Professional Declutterers and Organisers do have to subscribe to a code of conduct. Recently, declutterers from around the world came together to discuss Advanced Wardrobe Decluttering and Beyond the Shame – a Client’s Perspective. Presumably it was one of the few conferences for which no one lost their ticket or missed their plane. Elinor Goodman was political editor of Channel 4 News from 1988 to 2005

We captured the castle David James’s family saved a crumbling Welsh castle from destruction – twice

Dynevor Castle in 1973, when David James’s father bought it

ne day in 1973, my father, a former coal miner from Ebbw Vale, decided to buy a castle. This was not a pumped-up neo-Georgian pile built by some Edwardian industrialist. No, this was Dynevor Castle (also known as Newton House), Llandeilo, completed in 1660 in rolling Welsh countryside, shaped into a deer park by Capability Brown. It was beautiful, with over 40 rooms, including a working theatre and music room, a dovecote, walled gardens, four turrets, a church, a (dry) moat and courtyards, which had housed the many staff who served Lord Dynevor and his ancestors through the centuries. Death duties had done for many of the great estates left intact after the war, still bravely keeping a small number of staff in tiny rooms, with dust collecting behind ancient limousines in garages. Richard Rhys, the then Lord Dynevor, had no choice but to sell up to pay the tax man. His loss was my family’s gain: they bought the estate, for the same price that it would cost to buy a one-bedroom flat in Surbiton today. Like some tragic, Welsh rewriting of a Chekhov play, Lord Dynevor lived on the periphery of his former estate, 22 The Oldie August 2022

an outsider looking on as history discarded him. It was a place of wonder. As a young boy, I spent too long looking up at the walls adorned with images of scantily dressed women that injured onanistic American servicemen had painted in the Second World War, as they recuperated in the sanatorium, wondering how they had found themselves such a long way from Kansas. I ran down long, deserted corridors, as though in a scene from a Stephen Poliakoff drama. I walked among the strange, beautiful White Park cattle, and watched, fearfully, the stags rutting on the Capability Brown slopes. It didn’t last long enough. We saved the castle from ruin, but sold it six years later to a Dutch family, who converted it into a Steiner school. It was doomed to fail. They, like the Dynevors, struggled financially, and

There was a working theatre, dovecote, walled gardens and a (dry) moat

started stripping the lead from the roofs, ripping out Adam fireplaces and selling off various fixtures and fittings. No doubt they now adorn many living rooms in London, a diaspora of artefacts with forgotten provenances. The painted ladies, exposed to the rains of Wales, quickly melted away. The estate was broken up – but in 1984 my brother bought the house back and saved it from destruction. By the 1990s it had found its way to the National Trust, with a new story to tell of its survival. The Trust does many things well, including protecting ancient buildings from neglect. But they want to tell only one collective, uniform story, which has them as the heroic saviours: the protectors of a past, alone in understanding it, uniquely qualified to interpret it to a grateful membership and fee-paying nation. It is history re-imagined. Like many other owners of Trust properties, our family has been written out of the castle’s story because we don’t fit with the prescribed view. My father saved the estate from a fate other great houses suffered in the ’70s and ’80s. Yet his actions are now not even a footnote in the Trust’s airbrushed tale. The same will be true for hundreds of properties owned by the Trust: the complex, messy, personal plots and chapters that do not cohere with their grand narrative are silenced, stripped away like the layers of paint and wallpaper that other, anonymised owners applied. These stories need to be told if we are to understand that the cultures worth saving need to be salvaged from the pasts that others want to invent. The great buildings of our country are filled with forgotten voices lost to a corporate owner. We need to hear them again.

On the great poet’s centenary, A N Wilson pays tribute to his gentle, brilliant friend – one of the funniest people he’s ever met

What larks with Larkin!

gasp at my amazing luck – to have been a friend of Philip Larkin. He’d have been 100 this year on 9th August, had not drink, melancholy, cancer and despair got to him first, on 2nd December 1985, when he was just 63. One of his most haunting poems, about the Arundel Tomb in Chichester Cathedral, suggests that ‘our almost instinct’ might be ‘almost true – what will survive of us is love’. Larkin was less lucky. What survived of him were hundreds of letters. One of his literary executors, a minor poet and hack editor called Anthony Thwaite, decided in 1992 to publish a selection of them. Thwaite was a friend of Larkin’s but, presumably, like a lot of moderately intelligent persons, utterly devoid of any common sense. He cannot have wanted his friend’s reputation to be torpedoed, though this was the inevitable consequence of putting into print words that were meant only for the eyes of friends. Why did Thwaite not bin the (relatively few) appalling letters? Larkin was hugely liked, not only by his cronies such as Kingsley Amis, and the Fellows of All Souls of whom he was one, but also by the staff of the various university libraries where he worked. He was one of the funniest men I ever knew. Difficult to convey the funniness, because part of the joke was going further than was quite tolerable or could conceivably have been ‘meant’. The extreme rudeness about his friends, for example – Anthony Powell was a ‘horse-faced Welsh dwarf’, I remember, in some of the letters – was only partially ‘meant’. It didn’t mean he did not like the friends. 24 The Oldie August 2022

Philip Larkin (1922-85)

‘In a sane world, Ted [Hughes] wouldn’t be Poet Laureate; he’d be the village idiot.’ These things were said to amuse, and shock other friends. He used to say the most terrible things about friends, especially Kingsley, who had been fool enough to marry. Take such remarks and put them into print for an audience of thousands and you have somehow changed them. His relationship with one of his longest-standing girlfriends, Monica Jones, produced the best letters. Letters to Monica is a truly wonderful volume, to which I return over and over again. But there can be no doubt that she was a damaged person. When she had applied herself to the gin bottle, a horrific picture of her fellow mortals appeared

before the thick lenses of her Dame Edna Everage specs. She loathed the human race, and what must have begun as a sort of joke, with poor Larkin, ended in those disastrous tapes of them getting totally plastered together and singing some mind-bogglingly awful lyrics. If only they had been destroyed! It was always, for my wife and children and me, a red-letter day when Larkin turned up at our house in Oxford. There was lots of ironic, subdued malice about the friends we had in common. He once said, ‘When she was at Hull, I really fancied X,’ about a notably plain friend. When the laughter died down, he added, ‘No, no. I mean it. I really fancied her.’ It had clearly been true. Like almost all people aged 30, I found it impossible to take seriously a 60-yearold’s emotional life or sexual preferences. Out of the wistfulness, the sadness, the peculiarly observant remarks about the weather and special characteristics of places we had visited together – Beverley, Port Meadow, York – came the poems: some of them, surely, as good as anything written in our lifetimes. The Whitsun Weddings is as close to being a perfect poem as you are likely to find. Apart from the perfect diction of the piece, its success derives from its refusal to make statements. It is a bit like a documentary film. Its series of snapshots of all the weddings, encountered on different stations, and all the lives that have come together, combine with a picture of England – ‘someone running up to bowl’ – and the final extraordinary lines: ‘A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/Somewhere becoming rain’ – an image suggested by another great English masterpiece, the Battle of Agincourt in Olivier’s Henry V.

GARY WING

Larkin was the laureate of an England that was already vanishing – see his Going, Going, as he described it. Church Going, another of the great anthology pieces, took it for granted – correctly – that within a generation of its being written, almost no one would attend these beautiful fanes as worshippers. In the days I knew him, I was more religious than I am in my old age. I introduced him to an ‘extreme’ AngloCatholic priest friend of mine – Francis Bown – who also lived in Hull. They hit it off. Part of this may have been an overlap of political viewpoint, but it was also a sign, I thought, of how broad Larkin’s sympathies were. He did not want to meet just writers; still less famous people. I remember him asking me about what it was like to be entertained to dinner by the poet Stephen Spender. The conversation was not unkind. Or not very. We both agreed that Spender was one of the nicest men we knew. But our talk ended in laughter, not before Larkin

had totted up – had he accepted one of the Spenders’ invitations – the train fare from Hull, the taxi fare from Euston to Loudoun Road NW8 and the cost of staying the night in a club or hotel. And all for meeting the London literati. With the money saved, he could buy a jazz record, a new Michael Innes novel, possibly a bottle of gin and some pornographic magazines, and have an evening in. Of course, I knew that he did occasionally go to such dinner parties with the Spenders, and that he stayed sometimes with his hero, John Betjeman, in Chelsea. The joke was, though, to pretend that he never left Hull, nor wanted to do so. Whether you blame Monica, the porno mags, the booze or just lacrimae rerum, there was an undoubted coarsening. In one of the letters to Monica, he opined that Mr Bleaney – the one about taking a bedsit in an appalling house, previously occupied by the eponymous hero of the poem – is better than An Arundel Tomb. ‘Mr Bleaney is more real.’

This is the side of Larkin that would slither down, via They Fuck You Up, into his writing some of the more drunken letters. Bar-parlour stuff. The poetic gift died in him partly because he stopped letting language observe – as he does, looking out of the train window in The Whitsun Weddings – and started opining. A kind of Hull Alf Garnett was tugging at his sleeve, wanting to be heard. The friend I knew was never like that. I can still remember gentle, clever things he said about the poetry of Thomas Hardy, or some of the loonier effusions of D H Lawrence, which he rather enjoyed. It’s the Larkin who wrote Show Saturday (‘Let it always be there’) or Sunny Prestatyn that we cherish. When you read through the complete poetic works, as I have just done, yet again, you realise there is an awful, sad wisdom about life, and about the history of England in his lifetime. A N Wilson’s Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises (Bloomsbury) will be published on 1st September The Oldie August 2022 25

Mary Killen’s Fashion Tips

What goes up must come down Skirt lengths rise and fall with the economy

Hemlines used to go up or down, according to whether the economy was in boom (short) or bust (long). Even HM the Queen wore a skirt above the knees in the booming 1960s. Most women happily went along with whatever was decreed to be the current fashion. Today, in line with other cultural confusions, there are no rules. Women wear the skirt lengths they feel like wearing. That’s all very well. But they should bear in mind the golden ratio – also known as the divine proportion*. It was espoused by Leonardo da Vinci, who observed that, in art and architecture, certain proportions are universally pleasing to the human eye – while others jar. And so it is with women’s clothes. Certain clothes’ dimensions are more attractive than others on differentshaped bodies. As a short, squat person aspiring to a more divine proportion, I must stick to the mid-calf-length hemline. This will make my outline seem more streamlined and less like a barrel on stalks – which is how it would look if I dressed in a miniskirt. But there’s no need for other, ‘right’sized, oldie women to reject the miniskirt for fear of looking like mutton dressed as lamb. Miniskirts can look good on the over-35s but only when accompanied by thick black tights. The tights are key because, even if your figure is as taut and erect as an ironing board, the knees will have issues. Like the nose and ears, knees change shape as life rolls on. In childhood, they are little more than three-dimensional dimples marking the boundary between calf and thigh. Then, before the growth spurt is over, our knees inevitably sustain injuries when we run without looking where we’re going and fall on them. As adults, we stress the patellar ligament. Callus, or thickened skin, is grown as part of the healing mechanism. Result: knobbly knees. Moreover, ageing knees become crêpey. Best to screen them off with thick black tights. 26 The Oldie August 2022

Some skirt lengths signal superior genes. At competitive social events, such as school speech days, the genetically favoured will be able to look chic in a close-fitting skirt, ending just below the knee, worn with skin-coloured tights. This length is quietly boastful because it wouldn’t look good on anyone hosting excess weight, varicose veins or cankles (ankles that merge seamlessly with calves). Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac defied the convention that female titans of rock should be nearly nude on stage. With no reduction in star quality, Nicks covered up with long sleeves and a mid-calf hemline. Carrie Symonds also channels the grown-uplittle-girl look with lots of flounces, puffy sleeves, high necklines and mid-calf hemlines. Yet mid-calf, which can be so flattering to all shapes and sizes, is a curiously hard hemline to find. Time was when only Sophie Dundas, selling mainly online or at pop-up sales in private houses, could cater for the needs of those of us seeking non-hippie, semi-smart, long-sleeved, tastefully patterned mid-calf dresses. Cottoning on to this cult success, Rixo and Ted Baker now produce a range of mid-calf hemlines. Laura Ashley once produced the right sort of floral printed dresses at the right length to flatter all wearers, but the company lost its way following the death of its founder in 1985. As those who eventually took the reins found out, there was more to the magic than just following a formula.

Mini Majestic: the Queen in May 1970

Cath Kidston stepped into the breach for a while, supplying vintage-style, mid-calf floral-print dresses. When Cath sold up, the new owners produced lookalike designs but, in a misguided bid to attract younger buyers, served these up as minidresses. Problem: the young turn their noses up at small floral prints and the hemlines were now too short for oldies. Maxi skirts had a moment during the (bust) ’70s when colours were uniformly dreary. At Cranborne Chase girls’ school, the building was so cold that the girls, who were obliged to wear skirts in the morning but could change to trousers in the afternoon, used to wear skirts on top of the trousers all day. Maxi skirts provided warmth but otherwise have always been more of a liability than a style statement. You rarely see one these days – except in Marlborough High Street, where they are the compulsory uniform for the sixth-form and uppersixth girls of Marlborough College. Worn in her day by the then Kate Middleton, they are known as ‘puddle skirts’, as each hemline is characteristically caked in mud. But tradition must prevail. * The ratio is a special number (equal to about 1.618). It’s calculated by the division of a line into two parts, such that the whole length of the line divided by the long part of the line is equal to the long part of the line divided by the short part of the line. The divine proportion predominates in natural forms and we feel at home with it.

My burial plot Despite being Jewish, screenwriter Laurence Marks will be buried in a churchyard – next to the Hitler-supporting Mitford sisters

GARY BLAKE / PICTORIAL PRESS LTD / ALAMY

am going to break medical confidentiality now. But stay with me – it leads to somewhere strange. A graveyard in the Cotswolds. After I’d bribed an appointment with my GP, we were sitting opposite each other when he asked me, ‘Have you thought about where your final resting place will be?’ ‘I didn’t think I was that poorly,’ I replied. ‘No, no – you’re very healthy,’ the doctor said. ‘I was just making small talk.’ I had never given it any thought. My parents are buried in a Jewish cemetery over in Hertfordshire. I, never having been a member of a synagogue, wouldn’t be admitted. Besides, I suffered enough turmoil stomaching my parents in life; why would I choose to be with them in death? I asked my wife, ‘Where are we going to be buried, sweetheart?’ She told me she wasn’t. She wanted to be cremated and have her ashes sprinkled on the Dents du Midi, a mountain range close to our Swiss home. ‘Am I to do the sprinkling?’ I asked. I didn’t fancy the idea of cremation. I certainly didn’t want to get stuffed, as my co-writer Maurice Gran suggested (I presume he was referring to death). So it had to be burial. And then it came to me. I know where I want to be buried. My big problem is I am Jewish and where I want to be laid to rest is in a Cotswolds churchyard. After moving from London to the Cotswolds in 1993, I was asked by the BBC to make a radio programme, My Oxfordshire. I was to interview five people who had made my life smoother in the countryside. One of them was the Rev Richard Coombes, my local vicar, who introduced me to Swinbrook Church. He asked me whether he could count on my becoming one of his flock. I explained I was not of his faith. He said it didn’t matter; we all believe in the same God. He then proceeded to show me round the gorgeous church and its churchyard.

Marks by the Mitford graves; Hitler and Unity

And I noticed many of the Mitford sisters were buried there. I was sure it was here, in Swinbrook churchyard, that I want to be my final resting place. Not only has it the most picturesque aspect. It also contains the graves of Unity and Diana Mitford. And the devil in me (perhaps devil and church shouldn’t be used in the same sentence) considered that nothing would aggravate the sisters more than knowing they had a Jew in their midst. Unity had a Messianic crush on Adolf Hitler and became the Führer’s groupie. Diana married Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. I was very well versed in Unity’s story and had the misfortune to speak to Diana in the late 1990s while Maurice Gran and I were writing the film Mosley. It was through Mosley’s oldest son, Nicholas, that we were granted access to the ‘Mosley archive’. Nick also organised a conversation with his stepmother, Diana. I would have preferred to meet her face to face in her Paris home. But when she learned who I was, she said, ‘I don’t think we really want a Jew in our house, do we, Nicholas?’

Nothing had changed. She certainly hadn’t. Diana and I spoke for no more than 20 minutes, and she told me about her sister Unity. Four years her junior, Unity Valkyrie Mitford became besotted with Hitler before old Adolf became the German Chancellor. Every day Unity would paint herself and sit in the Bavaria Osteria, Munich, the favoured café of Hitler and his playmates. One lunchtime, Hitler invited this ‘mystery woman’ to join him – but only on the condition she remove all her make-up. And so she did. She would do anything for the man she hoped one day would become her husband. Unity pleaded with Diana to join her in Munich, which she did. Their parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale, followed to meet and take tea with the man they hoped might one day become their son-in-law. Apparently, Lord Redesdale was so taken with Hitler that he offered him Swinbrook House, the family domicile, for his headquarters when Hitler invaded Britain. What a generous offer, don’t you think? Thankfully, Adolf never conquered this island of ours and never became a resident of Swinbrook. And now I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to spend the rest of my death among them, knowing my presence would make them rotate in their graves. Permission for my being buried there was granted to me just last month. There I’ll rest alongside the two fascists. How marvellous! The bishop who granted me my wish asked me whether I would have a headstone like Unity’s and Diana’s. I said I would. The bishop asked, ‘And what would you want carved on it?’ ‘This is the best plot I have ever had,’ I said. We laughed. Unity and Diana rotated once more. The Oldie August 2022 27

Desperate to go Thanks to a weak bladder, Ysenda Maxtone Graham is in a constant panic, always on the lookout for a loo or a hidden refuge

’m desperate to go out into the world after the constricting years of the pandemic. The only snag is that I’m also, on the hour every hour, desperate to go. This is not a medical piece about lower-urinary-tract disorder, because my condition is not as bad as that. That’s once every 20 minutes, day and night – genuinely horrid. It’s just a glimpse of the daily life of a normal middle-aged woman after childbearing, who was perhaps a bit slack about the pelvic-floor exercises 30 years ago. Rather than being horrid, my condition is merely a bore. And I think quite a few of us live with it. If you spot one of us eyeing up the foliage in a municipal garden, we’re probably not just admiring its beauty but sizing it up as a potential hiding place to squat down in. This was particularly the case during lockdown, when there were no other options. I became an expert at spotting urban foliage. Battersea Park was sadly lacking in thick-enough hedges in quiet-enough corners. A patch of tall reeds beside the Thames, outside a new-build development in Thamesmead, proved a godsend on a crowded bike ride from Greenwich to Erith. Though churches were closed – in fact, because churches were closed – churchyards came into their own for this purpose, too. You could sneak in and go behind an ancient yew tree with a thick trunk; or, in yew-tree-less modern churchyards with their too-tidy tarmacked forecourts, you could usually find a dustbin area to the side where you would be out of sight. This was my experience between Chertsey and Staines. Desperate times call for desperate measures. And ‘desperate’ is the right word. With a car petrol gauge (empty and needs to be full), you are at least

What a relief!

given a 60-mile warning when the sign comes on. Our clever modern car even shows us where the nearest petrol station is. In the opposite world of the bladder (full and needs to be empty), you get no warning sign, and no sat-nav guidance. Suddenly, every single thing in life becomes unenjoyable. You can’t talk, listen with pleasure to anything, think clearly or enjoy the scenery. How on earth can some people, such as David Cameron, actively prefer giving a speech on a full bladder? It’s astonishing how much urine seems to come out during a typical morning. Can the body find no lasting use for the early-morning cup of tea and the cup of coffee with breakfast? Apparently not. Precisely the same volume, if not more, seems to need to gush out again in the ensuing hours. What a waste, literally. Now that cafés and pubs are open again, the centrality of foliage in my life has dwindled. But still, we who go around the world on a weak bladder have to master the tricks. The last thing you want to do if you go into a pub for a

Suddenly, every single thing in life becomes unenjoyable

pee is buy a drink; that would undermine the whole self-emptying point of the exercise. So I’ve learned to use not an empty pub but a crowded one, and to walk in confidently, as if looking for a friend who’s already there. You must not make it obvious you’re searching for the Toilets sign, even if you don’t know where they are. Nonchalance and an air of familiarity are vital to draw attention away from yourself. I tried it at the Ritz the other day, caught short in Piccadilly. It went brilliantly. Confidence was all. I put on an arrogant facial expression and walked boldly and grandly past the uniformed staff members whose job it is to stop exactly this kind of misuse of the premises. Then I looked as if I was searching for a friend I’d arranged to meet for tea, all the while keeping my eye out for the Ladies sign. And there it was! I sauntered confidently, looking as wealthy as I could, down the carpeted staircase to the pretty powder room. It was a life-saver, as I was on my way to a party in a loo-less bookshop. Thank you, dear Ritz, and I really will come to tea soon. So on it goes, this constantly punctuated existence, every train journey requiring me to go before I leave home, as soon as I arrive at the railway station, on the train, as soon as I arrive at the other railway station and on arrival at my final destination. We weak-bladdered have become experts at locating the pullable piece of loo paper that’s got lost somewhere inside the drum. It’s part of our skill set. My worst dread is to be stuck in a traffic jam on a smart motorway. On country drives and walks, my heart lifts when I pass a gate, or a path off the path – anywhere off the beaten track, where I can tuck myself away, always remembering to avoid the stinging nettles and thistles at the central moment of buttock-lowering. The Oldie August 2022 29

My day at the races This summer, jockeys at the Palio, Italy’s greatest race, battled for a banner painted by Emma Sergeant

am standing in the courtyard of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. A sea of people wait in anticipation for the drappellone (banner) – the prize for the oldest horse race in the world, the Palio, dating back to the 14th century. It is about to appear through the doors to the sound of trumpets. Expectation, gasps – and then applause. Thank goodness, they like it. The Palio defines Siena and its population. They live to fight one another and win the drappellone, twice a year – once in July, with the second race in August. Ten of the 17 city wards (contrade) have a horse in the race. Each contrada has its own heraldry, and each jockey (fantino) wears the colours of the contrada they represent. They ride bareback on Anglo-Arab horses. Unlike in any other horse race, the contrade do not choose their horse. Instead, they are allocated one by lottery. Chance and luck play a huge part in the Palio. The Mayor of Siena invites two artists a year to paint the drappellone for each of the two annual Palios. Before the pandemic, I was commissioned to paint the Palio – which was then cancelled two years running. This gave me more time than any other artist since the Second World War to tackle the glorious traditions of the heraldry. There are very strict rules for the artist. First, the Madonna must be depicted either full-length or head and shoulders. There must be a reference to Siena. Thirdly, the banner should include the coat of arms of not only the city but also the three sections of the city. Lastly, the heraldry of the contrade selected to run must be there. The extra time allowed me to study the emblematic animals that belong to each contrada: the tortoise, the owl, the double-headed eagle and the dragon. I wanted my Madonna to be painted from life so she’d have her own character 30 The Oldie August 2022

Emma’s drappellone in Siena, 2nd July 2022

and spirit. I experimented with many versions: was she going to be a typical Italian Renaissance Madonna, a Sumerian goddess or a young Jewish girl? After much indecision and many sketches, I controversially decided to use my own features (pictured). I also painted a large horse head, linking the Madonna at the top of the banner to the rest of the heraldry. I drew my thoroughbred stallion, England Rules, as the focus point on the drappellone. The day before the Palio, the drappellone is taken from the Palazzo Pubblico to the church of Santa Maria in Provenzano to be blessed. As the drappellone is carried through the streets, drums beat, trumpets sound and we arrive in front of the church. The procession pauses briefly as the drappellone is lowered through the doors. Then it is carried to the altar to face the altarpiece. One Madonna looks at another. The Bishop of Siena blesses it with holy water. There is a short service and the drappellone is then fixed to a

stand to the right of the altar. Three representatives of each contrada – one drummer and two flag-bearers – walk up to the drappellone, displaying their flags and beating the drum. People approach my banner and throw their scarves up against it to bring their contrada luck in the race ahead. The day of the race, 2nd July, is fraught with expectation and passion – as if ten football teams dressed in Renaissance costumes are waiting to pulverise each other. The captains of the contrade plan their strategies – how to win the race, or block an enemy. The public, of course, have no idea of the complicated chess game being played behind the scenes. My sister and I make our way to the Palazzo Pubblico, where we have VIP seats in the palace windows. We share our position with the head of the Carabinieri. He is dressed in full uniform, with beautiful riding boots, and carries a sword, which he hangs on the back of my chair. Below, the crowds, filling the middle of the campo, break into applause. I lean out of the window and see four huge, white oxen pulling my banner on a historic cart captured from the Florentines over 800 years ago. After circling the square for all to see, my banner is installed high above the starting rope. The jockeys emerge from the palace and take their positions at the starting rope. They brandish whips made from dried bull penises. Tension mounts, with four false starts, one jockey thrown and two horses withdrawn because of injuries – and still the race has not even begun. I am affiliated with the Contrada of Tartuca (Tortoise). They are not running but it is a great joy to see my drappellone won by Drago – friends of my contrada. Most importantly, as someone from Tartuca says to me, knowing I am their supporter, ‘You brought us luck.’ The next Palio is on 16th August

King of fake news In the 1980s, Piers Pottinger invented a pretend PR supremo who fooled the world

Bot Air – the spoof airline cooked up by Piers Pottinger and his fellow PR pranksters

t the end of the eighties, public relations agencies were booming and even quite fashionable. I was fortunate to be working at a leading firm alongside some future stars. We worked hard, and we had fun. Our trade publication was called PR Week, which we used to read and discuss in the office. A colleague of mine, Nick Miles (who had been in the Footlights at Cambridge with Stephen Fry) was quick to point out some of the more ludicrous traits of some people in the PR world. We laughed at the oddly named provincial agencies and their curioussounding employees. Bizarre clients you had never heard of or were likely to read about were prolific. It was hard to take a lot of what we read seriously. One day, with time on our hands, Nick and I decided to create an agency with fictitious employees and fictitious clients. Perhaps we could even fool our own trade paper? We settled on calling it Stebbings Public Relations, which was to be run by Barrie (sic) Stebbings and his son Wayne from rural Suffolk. We asked a friendly designer to create extremely garish press-release paper and persuaded a fellow collaborator to let us put his phone number on the letterhead. If anyone rang asking for Barrie or any of the team, he was simply to answer, ‘They’re all down the pub,’ followed by ‘Sorry, mate, I cannot help you,’ and then abruptly hang up. The stage was set. Our first announcements were about staff arrivals and departures – all of course entirely fictitious. Jacqui de Beauvoir joined as an account assistant from Snip N’ Shape, the trendsetting Daventry hair-stylists. Vic Burfta appeared as a new account director, having ‘inexplicably’ left Van Hire Monthly, where he had been Features Editor (Junior). Next we had to create some clients. This is where we really let rip.

Here are some of the more outlandish ones and what we said about them: Bot Air Botswana’s foremost and indeed only budget airline, owned by Botswana tycoon Elvis Kowembo. It flew from Lydd Airport in Kent to Kowemboville, stopping 36 times en route. The pilot was called Loopy Walters and was Britain’s oldest serving commercial airline captain. He was called Loopy as he had once tried to loop the loop in a VC10. The British Toffee Council Based, naturally, in Harrogate, they had a proud motto, ‘We stick together’. The finance director was rumoured to be fudging the figures. Perkakuppe A Scandinavian coffee-filtration system that took the grit out of the ground. Its sister company was SNodercraft, which made at-home langlaufing systems – ‘Enjoy the pleasures of Norwegian cross-country skiing in the comfort of your own lounge’ was its slogan. Other notable clients included The Amsterdam Pear Authority, Dibdiss the Chemists and the department store Snelding and Hidmarsh. Another favourite was BALBR, the British Association of Live Bait Retailers. The trick was to make them all sound nearly credible, at least to those who operated in the world of PR. We sent out press releases and some gained coverage we were not expecting. Then we announced that Stebbings was to float on the unlisted securities market and the coverage took off. The results surprised even us.

Aside from in PR Week, the news was picked up by the now defunct Financial Weekly, and other City pages gave Barrie a mention. Nobody questioned his client list or followed up their rebutted telephone enquiries. The Business Magazine (a glossy monthly, also now extinct) conducted a poll to ask City editors and senior business journalists to name their favourite PR man or woman. The City Editor of the highly influential Sunday Telegraph, who was in on the joke, named Barrie Stebbings. This was pointed out by Private Eye, who referred to the celebrated Barrie as ‘humble, Suffolk-based’. Circuitously, we had fooled even Private Eye – perhaps a high point for us, albeit a dangerous one. After this, we thought about following up with companies like Stebsports Promotions, who ran a pro-celebrity golf tournament on a nine-hole pitchand-putt course near Sudbury. We considered adding SteveCon ’90, which was to be the first conference highlighting the skills of British stevedores, featuring a number of at-sea events despite potentially inclement weather at Grimsby in November. In the end, sadly, common sense prevailed and we got back to work. I’d like to think that Barrie, perched on his bar stool with his pint of wallop and bag of pork scratchings, would have enjoyed it all as much as we did. Piers Pottinger has worked in public affairs for over 30 years The Oldie August 2022 31

Bowled over For 70 years, Dick Clement has had a rocky love affair with cricket. England’s latest performances had him swooning all over again

MIRRORPIX

had to fall in love with cricket. It was almost compulsory. The headmaster of my prep school, Alleyn Court, was Denys Wilcox, who captained Essex. He wasn’t especially good at cricket, but in those far-off days, captains had to be ‘gentlemen’. He obviously qualified – look at the way he spelt ‘Denys’. His face was set in a permanent look of disapproval, even when he went to bat for Essex, usually about number seven. Yet I still remember what he taught me about the game: backing up the fielder’s throw, walking in from the outfield as the bowler delivered, making clear calls to your partner, yes or no, when there was a chance of a quick single. It was a religion and, unlike all the others, it stuck. If only I’d had some talent. As if it wasn’t enough to have your headmaster captaining Essex, our English teacher was Trevor Bailey. He made his England debut as a fast bowler against New Zealand, and we small boys were thrilled to report that their openers had been ‘bowled Bailey’. ‘That’s Mister Bailey to you,’ came a swift rebuke. When I was ten, the Australians were touring and I went to see them play Essex. They scored 721 in a day. Four of them each scored a century, including Don Bradman. Keith Miller was out for a golden duck. Rumour had it he was in the middle of a card game and didn’t want to lose focus. Essex were then bowled out for 52. I wondered if I would ever live long enough to see us beat the Aussies. We did, four years later. I was at the Oval when Len Hutton hit the winning run. I lived in a seaside town and we had a beach hut. We played cricket all the time – on the mud if the tide was out, or on a piece of rough ground when it was in. If you hit the tennis ball over the fence on 32 The Oldie August 2022

Trevor Bailey, Dick Clement’s English teacher – and England Test star, 1955

the other side of the road, the rule was ‘six and out’. My older brothers hit a lot of those. I never hit one. My first job was at the BBC, where I did shift work. If I had a gap, I would check the score at Lord’s and if Ted Dexter was due to bat, I hopped on a bus to see him. My love for the game was as strong as ever but, without any talent, how was I ever going to get a game? The answer hit me one day: form your own team. I would never be ‘dropped’. I worked in the Overseas Department of the Beeb at Bush House. So I called my team the Bushwhackers. I found a nucleus of four of five players who had played a bit. Then it was a question of finding fixtures through friends. I began to include actors in the team. One of them was my friend Tom

Courtenay, not long after Doctor Zhivago. When I tossed him the ball, the scruffy scorer in the pavilion called out to ask the bowler’s name. Tom replied with great dignity, ‘Courtenay’. As he set the field, the urchin yelled, ‘’Ow d’you spell it?’ Several of the actors who played for the Bushwhackers also played for Harold Pinter, who had his own team. Harold apparently took the game far more seriously – a dropped catch was a venial sin. They preferred my more laid-back attitude. My longtime writing partner, Ian La Frenais, played a couple of games but in truth he was no better than me. On the other hand, he had a childhood friend named Charlton Lamb who had played county cricket. Charlie played our most memorable innings at the County Ground in Maidstone. He turned up late when we were 1 for 3. The not-out batsman was my other star player, Ian Gillham. He added a single to his score while Charlie got 50. He went on to make the only ever Bushwhacker century in a total of 150. We still lost, but we walked away with our heads held high. What has prompted this wave of nostalgia? Blame Joe Root and Jonny Bairstow. Bless their Yorkshire hearts – they reminded me all over again what a wonderful and unpredictable game this is, making you hold your breath while a partnership builds, ball by ball, until the impossible is suddenly, wonderfully achieved. The 20-over slog is not for me. I love the extended tension of the five-day game, the Holy Grail. I’m still a true believer. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais wrote The Likely Lads, Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet

Stop grousing On the Glorious Twelfth of August, don’t attack grouse-shooting. In fact, the sport protects wildlift habitats. By Jamie Blackett

he start of the grouse-shooting season on 12th August – the Glorious Twelfth of Victorian hagiography – is an important fixture in the malcontents’ calendar. It slots in with May Day (aka International Workers’ Day), various woke ‘awareness days’, party conferences and foxhunting’s Boxing Day meets. Like the last category, it is an anti-celebration, an annual hate-fest and an opportunity to further the long march of the left through the countryside. The idea of ‘culture wars’ as a proxy for the ancient struggle between left and right is now common currency. ‘Environmentalism’ is the modern version of 18th-century Rousseauism – the pre-Marxist idea that all property is theft, enshrined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). It has provided an outlet for the animosities of those who once marched to ban the bomb or keep the coal mines open. The hunting ban was their first victory and grouse-shooting has been their target ever since. Neo-Rousseauist journalists (I call them Neo-Roos) such as George Monbiot and Chris Packham will reheat Guardian pieces excoriating the ci-devant Establishment (they are blissfully unaware that they are now the Establishment themselves) for ‘grouse-farming’ in the uplands, presiding over ‘biodiversity deserts’ and ‘scorched-earth policies’ and encouraging ‘wildlife crime’. Most of what you read will be complete rubbish – possibly almost as much rubbish as this – a deliberately false narrative that has been carefully honed for decades – at least since that hallowed event in the protester’s folk memory, a forerunner of Extinction Rebellion: the Kinder Scout trespass of 24th April 1932 (during the bird-nesting season), when the Young Communist League staged an invasion of the 10th Duke of Devonshire’s grouse moor. There is no need to feel sorry for grouse-moor owners, obviously. They 34 The Oldie August 2022

are, by definition, multimillionaires. But one should see them, and particularly the rural communities they support, as badly traduced victims of the culture wars. If we have a monsoon August, the articles will be titled, ‘Grouse-shooting is responsible for flooding’. Actually, grouse-moor managers deliberately block drains and wet the land (thereby keeping water from the rivers and abating floods) to encourage insect life to feed grouse chicks. What drains there are were mostly put there to increase lamb production during one of the government’s Dig for Britain phases. If the weather is hot and dry, we will read how ‘scorched-earth’ heatherburning degrades the environment and contributes to climate change. Actually, cleverly controlled ‘cool burning’ of small patches by gamekeepers in late winter prevents wildfires by creating firebreaks. It also turns rank vegetation into soil carbon and creates the mosaic of vegetation needed by wildlife – such as voles, which in turn provide food for owls and kestrels, for example. Where the vegetation was instead allowed to grow rank and caught fire accidentally on land managed by the RSPB on Saddleworth Moor this year, it really did cause biodiversity loss over a huge area and massive release of carbon. Whatever the weather, we will be told that grouse-shooting is responsible for the loss of rare birds. The bigger the lie, the more believable it is. The truth is that endangered ‘redlisted’ birds such as hen harriers, black grouse, curlews and lapwings would probably now be extinct but for grousemoor management. The egregious ‘wildlife crime’ is when Natural England and the RSPB mismanage the uplands by failing to maintain habitat or control predators and these wonderful birds die out. This spring saw state-sponsored ecoterrorism, when lesser black-backed gulls from a vast gullery in Lancashire

were allowed to range across the Forest of Bowland, hoovering up curlew chicks, because Natural England had decided to protect the ubiquitous gulls and severely restricted the issue of licences The famous to cull them. grouse Moor-owners spend more time holding binoculars than wielding guns. They will spend huge sums of money to protect unique habitats. Then they can witness the dramatic spectacle of a blackcock lek or walk across the moor in springtime, listening to the liquid sounds of larks, curlews and lapwings performing aural sex on the wind. And (perhaps partly as a result of the Kinder Scout trespass) there are footpaths such as the Pennine Way so that the rambling public can enjoy that too. The excitement of sitting in a butt trying to shoot grouse hurtling towards the guns at 60mph – the shooting equivalent of trying to return one of Rafael Nadal’s serves – is the reward for a whole year’s – sometimes several years’ – work maintaining Britain’s globally unique moorland environments to create a harvestable surplus of grouse. It is an interesting time in the uplands. The biodiversity crisis is coming back to bite the Neo-Roo establishment. The evidence is mounting that the number of rare birds on the increasingly large moorland estates managed by the RSPB, such as Lake Vyrnwy in Wales, is no more than on similar privately owned estates – and very possibly less. But that won’t stop the traditional ‘Inglorious Twelfth’ articles coming round again. Jamie Blackett, a Dumfriesshire farmer, is author of Land of Milk and Honey: Digressions of a Rural Dissident (Quiller)

Small World

I’m the Dylan Thomas of Cleethorpes Local tweenagers attacked me as I rewrote Under Milk Wood jem clarke

STEVE WAY

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his parents… My mother’s cultural tastes are defined by her mantra – ‘I like only documentaries and nice things.’ So I did not expect much interest when I explained I had not dusted my bedroom for a fortnight. I was feverishly gripped by the muse. I was working on an Under Milk Woodstyle play for radio, comprising only real-life dialogue I had captured during my perambulations round the boisterous streets of our Victorian seaside town. ‘Ooh, let us hear it,’ cooed my mother. I said in the squeaky voice of an urchin, ‘Throw the apple core at the dwarf’s head!’ I then admitted, ‘That’s all I’ve got so far – I had to run back home after that.’ ‘Still having trouble with those boys from Number 7? Why don’t you try not to pass their house?’ Mother said. ‘You lack imagination.’ ‘Mother, we live at the bottom of a cul-de-sac. I don’t lack imagination. I lack an ability to scale a seven-foot fence. Besides, I’m not a coward.’ It was true. I make a point of answering them with a Paddington Bear hardest stare. Sometimes I don’t go directly home, but instead disappear purposefully down a neighbour’s drive. Then any observant hoodlum will target the wrong house, should they go for some sort of prank attack. Recently, the nice young couple across the way went on holiday. I walked up their long garden path to their front door – I even got my own keys out and mimed entry – hoping one of the kids would target the wrong house. Imagine my surprise and guilt when, the next morning, someone had painted sinister bright-green chalk arrows all along the road directly to the young couple’s house, and even up their garden path to the door.

This was some Putin-sized boldness on the part of the tweenage terrors. I was all very NATO about it. Rather than retaliate like-for-like, I scrubbed every trace of all those green arrows (one hour; five of my mother’s finest Wilko sponges) out of existence. I gathered more lines for my ‘poem play’ from my travels (‘No winners on that ticket, Mrs Pundleberry – do you want one for Wed-nes-day?’ and ‘Can you move out of the way of the milk? For a tiny fella, you’ve got a lot of horizontal, lad’). I opened the door to find Mrs Allison, a well-spoken paramedic who used to keep going off on the sick, in my kitchen. ‘Oh my goodness – Mum and Dad are

all right, aren’t they?’ I said, in an overly practised tone of utter concern. ‘Oh yes,’ she reassured me. ‘Just I’m the chair of the Neighbourhood Watch.’ ‘Of course.’ I sighed an actorly breath of relief. ‘And you’ve come round about the kids at Number 7?’ ‘No, I’ve come round about you,’ she said. ‘The couple across the way have emailed me from Tenerife, to say you’ve got a strange vendetta against them. ‘Their doorbell camera shows you lurking at their front door on multiple occasions,’ Mrs Allison continued. ‘Later you scrubbed out all the chalk marks their internet-provider drew on their path – to show where to dig a trench for their new broadband cable.’ The Oldie August 2022 35

Pretty smug Frances Wilson explains the Prettiest Girl at School Syndrome – an ego-boosting condition that lasts for ever

’ve a friend in her late fifties – let’s call her Eve – who has been grumpy for the 30 years I’ve known her. She walks grumpily, her clothes are grumpy, her hair is grumpy, her mouth is downturned, her expressions are sour and everything she says is designed to inject her grumpiness into the atmosphere. Not that she is unhappy in any way; life has been kind to Eve. She is wealthy, her children are happy and her marriage has somehow survived. Eve has rock-solid self-esteem and the only reason she is grumpy is that she has never, like the rest of us, felt the need to learn social skills. Why might this be? Having always been baffled by Eve, I then saw a photograph of her aged 15 and the mystery of her character fell into place. Eve suffers from a syndrome I call PGS, or Prettiest Girl at School. My theory is that our sexual egos are formed in the classroom and bolstered by the school environment. So the status we have in the school pecking order is the one we hold onto for the rest of our lives. Girls who are plain in their teens and blossom in their twenties act like plain girls all their lives, while the PGS will behave like a deity long after her bloom has vanished. And the bloom disappears quickly – usually by the age of 22. As Julie Burchill declared, ‘It has been said that a pretty face is a passport. But it’s not. It’s a visa and it runs out fast.’ So it is in nature of the PGS to live, like a mayfly, for a day. But what a day! While lesser mortals are battling with acne and weight gain and what is now called social anxiety, the PGS is desired and envied beyond measure. Her presence in the room is transformative; the very waves part for her. The Eve I saw in the photograph was still grumpy but she was also gorgeous, and every day of her life is a confirmation of that gorgeousness. 36 The Oldie August 2022

Because she once had a face that made everyone smile rather than feel on edge, Eve learned from birth that she could be praised and admired and invited to all the parties without having to make the slightest effort. Her prettiness alone meant that her place in the world was secured. Another PGS I know – let’s call her Jane – has handled her fate differently. Recognising that she has power only around those who were in her year at school, Jane married a man she Alicia Silverstone and Justin Walker, Clueless (1995) was at school with and has affairs with other men she was at Great Beauties were rarely the prettiest school with, while her female friends girl at school because beauty on a grand are the girls who once worshipped her scale tends to come later. in the dorm. Take Angelina Jolie, an ugly child The spell of the PGS doesn’t who grew into her face, which has now necessarily bewitch men in later life, been set by a plastic surgeon. I’ve known though. Take the experience of Charles many beautiful women but only three Dickens who, aged 42, arranged a secret Great Beauties, and in each case that tryst with his first love, Maria Beadnell, beauty briefly blazed and then went out whom he had not seen since she rejected like a light. This is because the beauty was him 24 years earlier. He recalled the a light. It lay not in the delicacy of the experience in Little Dorrit where Arthur bones or the mouth but in the nature of Clennam is reunited with his former the complexion, which glowed from sweetheart Flora Finching: within, as if painted by Gainsborough. ‘Flora, always tall, had grown to be Nor is PGS the same as very broad too, and short of breath; but De Clérambault’s syndrome, the that was not much. Flora, whom he had condition first described by Gaëtan left a lily, had become a peony; but that Gatian de Clérambault in 1885, which is was not much. Flora, who had seemed characterised by a delusional idea, enchanting in all she said and thought, usually in a woman, that a powerful was diffuse and silly. That was much. person – typically an older man – is in Flora, who had been spoiled and artless love with the holder of the delusion. long ago, was determined to be spoiled I have several friends with varying and artless now. That was a fatal blow.’ degrees of De Clérambault’s, only one of In other words, Flora behaved like the whom also suffers from PGS. This girl she thought he wanted to see rather particular woman – let’s call her Amy – than the woman she now was. Howling takes it as read that every man she with self-pity, Dickens cut off all contact. meets, even the homosexuals, will fall But what about poor Flora, who instantly under her spell and suffer expected a handsome young blade and terribly as a consequence. got an ancient-looking man with a She may well be right, but what I admire biblical beard? in Amy is her conviction. Beauty lies not PGS syndrome is not the same thing in the eye of the beholder, but in those of as having once been a Great Beauty. the woman looking in the glass.

The News from Westminster – and Canberra

My huge column For decades, Sir Les Patterson has been making outrageous advances in British and Australian politics

reetings, perusers. Les Patterson at your service and I’ve been as busy as Boris’s removals man lately. In the good old days, I used to go off on Australian Air Force One for a bit of relaxing recreation at my poor old mate Jeffrey Epstein’s sea-girt rub ’n’ tug shop. Now the killjoys reign supreme and the Australian taxpayers, God love ’em, have to make more undercover arrangements to keep me fit for my crusade for cultural and sexual freedom, Aussie-style. Of course I yield to none in my abhorrence of Lezzophobia. Even my own daughter has toyed with Sapphism – and ‘toyed’ is the appropriate epithet, considering some of the things my wife Gwen has found under Karen’s pillow on a routine frisk. But a top specialist, Dr Tina Schwartzblatt, reckoned my maverick daughter was ‘passing through a phase’, to use a medical term, and that she would straighten herself out eventually. Dr Tina pointed out that a lot of high-achieving sheilas – like Cleopatra, Mary Queen of Scots, Boadicea, Dusty Springfield and Florence Nightingale – all paddled the pink canoe at some stage of the game. I’m proud to say that my Karen has become pretty big on the fringe stand-up scene and Jeanette Winterson is a major fan. I suppose it is my grass-roots involvement with the Yartz that has made me so broad-minded and tolerant. As far as the new woke culture is concerned, I wrote the book. Look at this ‘pronoun’ controversy. For the record, I’ve called my wife Gwen ‘it’ for yonks, and I’ve called my daughter Karen, her wife, Fern Khachaturian, the tennis player, and their adopted

Cambodian orphan ‘them’ for years. Anyway, Fern isn’t Karen’s wife any more. She’s moved onto Fern’s son, so Fern is now, in fact, my daughter’s mother-in-law. Does that make sense? And now the Australian government want me to go back and take up a leadership position in the new Ministry of Mindfulness, incorporating the Ministry of Gender Re-assignment, as well as becoming Diversity Watchdog re TV commercials. A Pommy mate of mine in the House of Commons has been in the shit lately for having too many shandies and feeling up another bloke. Now the poor bastard has always been a bit light in the old loafers, but now he’s as low as a snake’s arsehole. His career is buggered and his mates are all whispering behind his back, which was probably their favourite position anyway. Meanwhile, outside in the West End, the pillow-biters are on parade, God love ’em, and the crowds are cheering them on for their courage and honesty, while a poor old politician is shafted for putting his hand on the wrong knee. If there isn’t a hint of hypocrisy here somewhere, the Pope’s a Red Sea pedestrian.

she blames herself that now he’s the age of 56, that area of his anatomy is still craving attention. I look for beauty everywhere, and here’s a passing reflection from your mate Les. Don’t forget there is nothing more beautiful in the world than a meaningful and caring relationship between a happily married Australian diplomat and one of his nubile research assistants. The lord be good to you all, Les Sir Les Patterson is Cultural Attaché to the Court of St James

Whenever my scallywag brother, the Rev Gerard Patterson, has consumed a few sherries, he loves to have us all in stitches with anecdotes from the sanctity of the confessional. The other day, some old sheila told him that when her son Liam was a kid, she used to dust his bum with Johnson’s Baby Powder, and The Oldie August 2022 37

Town Mouse

Dressing up for Queen’s and Lord’s tom hodgkinson

Until recently, watching sport was not one of this Town Mouse’s pastimes. That may be changing. I was glued to Wimbledon on TV. And I was recently introduced to the delights and occasional traumas of watching tennis and cricket live from members’ pavilions, thanks to two friends who have gone up in the world. Back in June, I spent the whole of one Tuesday watching tennis at Queen’s Club in west London, as the guest of a school friend who has done well in marine insurance. A few days later, I spent the afternoon at Lord’s, watching Kent versus Middlesex. This time I was the guest of a publishing tycoon. You probably bought one of his comics or magazines in the eighties. He now spends his time monitoring his various investments and watching cricket. In both cases, I was terrified of committing some breach of etiquette. My host is a member of Queen’s and we were thus entitled to sit in the pavilion. He noticed that I had not adopted the Queen’s uniform. ‘You’re the only man not wearing a blue shirt,’ my host commented with a smile. We looked around. He was right. Practically every bloke there had on a blue shirt, Panama hat and chinos. I was a bit of a scruffy mouse in my white T-shirt, stripy shirt, jeans and trainers. The tennis was thrilling. Various young gods, including the tall, dark Italian star Matteo Berrettini, walked a few feet in front of us and hit the ball at terrifying speeds across the net. My host and I were completely enraptured. Among the 9,000-strong audience were some affable young Hooray Henrys. ‘Did you behave terribly badly last night?’ we heard one say to another. ‘Oh no, I waited at least two hours until I put Tim’s Ray-Bans in his pint!’ 38 The Oldie August 2022

Being at Queen’s is something like being at a pop festival. Thousands of fans have congregated in one place for the sole purpose of watching their heroes perform. There are main stages and small stages and you are likely to see magic on an outer court. There is shouting and whooping and cheering. And a delightful sense of work suspended. But there are rules at sporting events. The guidance for what they call ‘attire’ at Lord’s is fairly strict. A few days before my trip there, I asked my friend, ‘Can I wear my Converse trainers?’ ‘Absolutely not,’ he retorted. ‘And you need to wear a tie as well.’ I dug out my linen suit and put on a stripy shirt and tie. I tucked the trousers into my socks and cycled to Lord’s in St John’s Wood. That’s one of the glories of the town

– you can cycle everywhere. I met Tony outside the ground and we walked into the pavilion, where only members and their guests are allowed. We sat down a few yards from the edge of the pitch. It was a pretty glorious sight. ‘First thing: you get me a large glass of white wine from the bar,’ my host commanded. ‘And make sure you take in the history while you’re there.’ I obeyed. And bought a Pimm’s for myself. I carried the two glasses back to the stand, past the august and massive portraits of cricketers of old, at which I dutifully gawped. ‘Excuse me, sir. EXCUSE ME!’ Oh dear. I glanced down at my attire. It all seemed to be in order. My tie was perhaps a little loose but, other than that, I couldn’t see what I had done wrong. I turned round to see a moustachioed official. ‘Absolutely no drinks to be taken into the pavilion.’ ‘Oh dear, it’s my first time. I’ve never been here before – I’m sorry,’ I spluttered. ‘Well you can take them now. But not again. You can bring your own drinks into the pavilion, but not drinks from the Long Bar.’ It was all rather confusing. But my host didn’t seem to be bothered. When he’d finished his first glass of wine, he went off to a bar that sold cans and smuggled them back in his jacket pocket. The atmosphere was a little brasher than I’d expected. It had something of an American baseball game. When a batsman got a six, fireworks were set off and the PA emitted whooping sounds. There was also a mascot – some sort of giant grinning bear in purple. And there was something else that surprised me. ‘How come the ball’s gone white?’ I asked, innocently. ‘Jesus, I really hope no one heard you say that,’ hissed my host, glancing around at the other chaps in the pavilion. Some were on their own; others in large groups. There were quite a few fathers and sons. And no hint of the boorish behaviour or superior glances I’d worried about. ‘But didn’t cricket balls use to be red?’ ‘They’ve been white for 20 years and, yes, W G Grace might be turning in his grave but we have to get used to it. It makes them more visible.’ I thank my hosts very much for their introduction to what is for this mouse a new world. I eagerly await my next invitation. I have even bought myself a Panama hat.

Country Mouse

A second home is where the heart is giles wood

The prospect of remaining in Wiltshire for the four-day Jubilee celebrations was denied me at a stroke by the arrival of a pamphlet through the cottage letter box. Sterner critics might accuse me of lacking community spirit. I confess I had been dreading being asked to help with car-parking or paint the backdrop for the Make Your Own Crown competition booth – ‘We thought of you Giles, because you’re an artist.’ Where this lack of communal spirit comes from my analyst and I never found out. I am aware that society would fall apart without scout leaders, Brown Owls and other key cogs in its wheels. So God forbid that everyone be like me. But seeing the words ‘Tug-o-war’ on the pamphlet was the clincher. It helped me decide to head for Anglesey. No one could criticise me for sharing the special occasion with a lonely old woman – my mother – in what is soon to be no longer my ‘second home,’ since the house is under offer. Unlike Wiltshire, the Principality was all but devoid of bunting or Union Jacks. ‘No Jubilee spirit, then?’ I asked the fishmonger. ‘Oh no – quite the opposite,’ he grinned. ‘You wouldn’t get Union Jacks round here. But no one’s arguing with the four-day-break side of things, if you get my meaning.’ Anglesey has always been a secondhome hot spot, with a 16.2-per-cent share of such sales, compared with Cornwall’s measly 10.8 per cent. In general, I have found the Welsh to be friendly towards non-natives. When the message ‘English colonists go home’ was daubed on a dry-stone wall near Beaumaris, it was quickly washed off by a local café-owner who quipped that it might prevent him from ‘fleecing the English colonists’. Nevertheless we are pleased that

my mother’s dwelling is under offer to a local Welshman. Short of inverting the free-market economy, there seems to be no formula to tackle the second-home problem. Draconian measures against outsiders have often proved counter-productive. In Switzerland, bans on sales to outsiders actually increased unemployment and harmed the local economy more than it reduced house prices for primary residents. Second-home ownership didn’t use to be a problem. North Wales has always been the playground of those who, like my father, worked in the Potteries. Resorts such as Rhyl, Colwyn Bay and Llandudno had the capacity to accommodate the escapees. These coastal Shangri-Las were acknowledged to be the lungs of the industrialised North, as was the Sussex coast for Londoners before the advent of the M4 corridor. I never agonised about the provision of local housing during my father’s tenure of a slum dwelling in Conwy, North Wales. All I can remember is the delicious (then mercury-free) cod and chips at the local café and the frisson of passing through an arch to the quay where Teddy boys lounged and on to mackerel-fishing on my father’s boat. The house itself was unimproved in

the days before IKEA. It was mid-terrace and had noisy plumbing. But halcyon days were spent walking for hours on mussel beds at low tide, sorting shells and beachcombing among the tessellated surfaces of the coastline. These experiences may have borne fruit when I later enrolled in a college in Ravenna to study the art of making Byzantine mosaics out of glass tesserae. Too little has been made of the psychological benefits of a second home. Relieved of the tedium of the quotidian, the creative soul can feel free to express itself. A PhD is asking to be written by a student of cultural history, identifying those artists, writers and composers who have gained the mental liberty necessary to create by leaving behind their primary home with all its resonances of expected conformity and chore management. It needn’t be a luxury enclave. Any unfamiliar location allows a break from one’s normal persona and the chance to experiment; an ability to live life rather than just endure it. The eminent biologist and student of human evolution E O Wilson supported the savanna hypothesis. Peoples of all cultures, given the opportunity, have, since time began, preferred an environment that supplies three key features. They want to live on a height looking down and out, and to scan a parkland with scattered trees and copses, closer in appearance to a savanna than to grassland or forest. And to be near a body of water: lake, river or sea. So, to sum up: as we live in a blame culture, it is not our fault that we crave second homes. First homes need to be somewhere practical where money can be made. And those who can afford it can’t help giving in to the impulse to buy a second home that falls in line with the savanna hypothesis. We are not to blame ourselves. The blame can be fairly and squarely attributed to the choices made millennia ago by our communal African ancestors, now hard-wired into 2022 man.

‘The movie was better’

The Oldie August 2022 39

Postcards from the Edge

Return of the Anglo-Irish

Since Brexit, the number of Brits claiming Irish citizenship has boomed. By Mary Kenny

TOBY MORISON

It’s 100 years since the British formally left southern Ireland, when the Irish Free State was established. But now the Brits have a cunning plan to return: by emigrating to Ireland and taking up Irish citizenship. The number of British people granted Irish citizenship this year has soared by 1,200 per cent (since Brexit). Ireland now attracts immigrants from 180 countries globally – and by far the greatest number of applications for citizenship comes from those born in Great Britain. In 2020, some 1,191 Britons were granted citizenship of the Irish Republic – rising from just 54 in 2015. One of the most renowned of these new Irishmen is the film producer Lord Puttnam, who has enthusiastically embraced his life in West Cork. David Puttnam describes his native Britain as ‘no longer the country I was born into’. Noting the line of 900 people queuing up to be garlanded with the nationality certificate bearing the Irish harp, Lord Puttnam remarked, ‘I’ll tell you what – there are no queues like this in England.’ Hasn’t he heard about the very considerable queues of people desiring to be acceptable to England? They even risk their lives to do so, arriving in small, fragile vessels across the Channel – nearly 30,000 last year. People are on the move, everywhere, swapping locations and nationalities. And perhaps David Puttnam is right in this respect: many countries will no longer be the same as its natives remember it. A public body which reports to Parliament – the Information Commissioner’s Office – has instructed staff to desist from using Latin phrases, such as quid pro quo, ergo, de facto and de jure. It seems that younger people may be confused by Latin (or French) terms. Yet many of these linguistic phrases have become part of recognised 40 The Oldie August 2022

a lovely character actor who was the heroic undercover Alain. They have been a lifeline to me, and an instructive alternative reality.

discourse. There was once a popular television programme called QED (Quod Erat Demonstrandum). And how could the courts function without allusions to habeas corpus, sine die and in absentia? The legal profession is steeped in Latin tags, such as de minimis, which refers to a rather sensible idea that the law should not concern itself with trifles. There’s even a saucy limerick I’ve heard lawyers recite to explain this principle. ‘There was an old fellow called Rex/ Who’d a diminutive organ of sex;/When charged with exposure,/He replied with composure,/“De minimis non curat lex.” ’ A bit rude, but an illuminating example of legal Latin. In these anxious times – COVID, a gruesome war in Ukraine, the cost-ofliving crisis – my weekly escapism has been to an imaginary Belgium during the Second World War. This is the superb 1970s TV drama Secret Army, which has been showing for months on the Talking Pictures channel. Drama should be about something important; something crucial should be at stake. Every episode, about secret Resistance work during the German occupation, really compels. Two of the principal actors died in the past year, Clifford Rose, a mildmannered man who played the dastardly Gestapo chief, Kessler, and Ron Pember,

Have you heard of the ‘Swedish clean’? I’m in the throes of one right now – clearing out a studio flat in Dublin I’ve rented for years, and trying to decide what goes to the dump, what gets kept, what might be useful for charity. I’m a lifelong clutterbug and it’s chaos. The full name for this ‘Swedish clean’ is döstädning – the ‘death clean’, as outlined by an organised Swede called Margareta Magnusson. You can do it at any stage of life – it would be typical of me to leave it until the last minute. The doleful aspect of this exercise is that it becomes an audit of my lifespan, and that can lead to rue and regret: I’m sorting through a trunkful of old letters, in tears. The stupid choices. The reckless relationships. The neglect of those I really loved. The unanswered mail. The diaries full of daily trivia. The paths not taken that should have been taken, and vice versa. And the wasted time! That above all. Then there’s all the ‘stuff’. The bits and pieces that once meant so much: the glass grape dish brought from South America by my father: my parents’ wedding china, so beautiful but now unwanted – younger people generally aren’t interested in old china. As a friend said to me, ‘What we have treasured over our lifetimes is just “stuff” to those who succeed us.’ And yet, whenever I’ve done biographical research, much of the ‘stuff’ cleared out during this döstädning is regarded as ‘archives’. The writer Lady Caroline Blackwood once coined a phrase, ‘the Irish tidy’ – chucking everything into a cupboard and shutting the door tight. That is my instinctive impulse, rather more than this melancholy ‘Swedish clean’.

Sophia Waugh: School Days

A joyful school trip to Georgian England A lot of a teacher’s time is spent on considering how to improve the performance of the weakest students. And a lot of a teacher’s energy is spent in managing the behaviour of the most disruptive. The result is that the brightest and the best are often left to fend for themselves. They behave in class, do their homework and get good grades – we don’t need to worry. If sometimes they spend time twiddling their pens while others are helped, well, it won’t really hurt them, will it? They’re doing fine. A state school with limited resources and a permanent fear of the arrival of Ofsted – ie most state schools – can let attention to these students slide. What joy, then, to discover that the head of department had created a reading club – and so much more than any old reading club. Called Cup Cakes and Classics, the weekly group is for invited-only girls. They’re in year nine – so not yet on the GCSE course – and are like how I probably once was. Their noses are in books. They’ve voluntarily moved on from the endless vampire series after the Twilight books and are tentatively exploring the classics. And they can bake. So far they’ve read (as a group) Little Women and Pride and Prejudice and they’ve just begun Far from the Madding Crowd.

We (because of course I’ve joined the gang) meet for lunch, talk about the current book, read a little of it together, and then read a few more chapters. My head of department has somehow found some money in the budget to give each of them their own copy of the book, plus a reading journal. It is a pure joy. Joy was added to joy with a trip. Schools are endlessly willing to let geographers go to the beach for the day. But English trips are pushed into the weekend, as though plays and books are a hobby, rather than a way of life. Yet here we were, at eight o’clock on a fine Monday morning, to board a coach to Bath’s Jane Austen Centre. While it cannot be said that the Jane

‘Sometimes I feel like a Stone Age guy in a Bronze Age world’

Austen Centre is the slickest in the land, there was something marvellous about being with pupils who not only knew something about the subject, and were prepared to listen respectfully to the talks, but also Got the Joke. The first talk was given by a young woman who felt she was destined for the stage. Dressed up in a brown silk (aka nylon) dress and a hairpiece, she presented herself as Lady Catherine de Bourgh and delivered her speech in excruciating character. Behaving like one of the badly behaved children we had left behind, I sat at the back and barely restrained my snorts of laughter. Another actor manqué, presenting himself as Mr Knightley, took us on a tour of the city, pointing out Austenrelated buildings as he went. Again, the pupils actively took an interest. We picnicked in the Royal Crescent, where I was surprised with birthday cakes and singing. As we sat in the sun, and I watched these lovely, intelligent, civilised students chatting over their morning and planning their brief afternoon shopping excursion, I realised there would come dark days again. So I should hold onto this, and remember the real joy of education – leading children out into the light, taking them beyond the curriculum to the treasure store that awaits them.

Quite Interesting Things about … teeth Snails have up to 12,000 teeth on their tongues. Sea urchins have five teeth that can drill holes in solid rock. A horse’s teeth take up more room in its head than its brain. Armadillos have 80 to 100 teeth, more than any other mammal. Leopards, cows and baboons have 32 teeth, like humans. When George Washington was inaugurated as President in 1789, he had only one of his

own teeth left. His false ones were made of human and hippopotamus teeth. Elephants have 26 teeth, including their tusks, which are giant incisors. Charles II of Spain’s teeth didn’t meet, so he couldn’t chew his food. Cats cannot chew their food, and most of their teeth have no function.

An Amur tiger’s fangs are as long as fingers and can slice through the heaviest bone. A jaguar’s teeth can bite through the shell of a turtle or the hide of a crocodile. Having studied their teeth, palaeontologists think crocodiles were once vegetarian. 55 million years ago, threefoot-long sabre-toothed anchovies roamed the seas.

Teeth of Neanderthals have shown traces of aspirin and penicillin. Eating the contents of your nose is good for you: it boosts your immune system and acts as a ‘mucus toothpaste’ to stop bacteria sticking to your teeth. For more on QI, visit qi.com and, on Twitter, @qikipedia The Oldie August 2022 41

sister teresa

I got into the habit with my Orthodox pals It has for years been a great relief to me that the sumptuary laws in this country are minimal. I went for a bracing walk in my nun’s habit on a windswept beach outside Great Yarmouth last winter. I think I am right in saying that had I tried to do the same thing at Cannes, I could have been arrested and fined. I have serious reservations about secularism. The joy of freedom from regulations about the clothes one is allowed to wear were brought home to me the other day when I paid a visit to Stoke Newington. Stoke Newington has the highest concentration of Hasidic Jews in Europe; midweek and at midday they were in evidence everywhere. From young schoolboys to very elderly gentlemen, they all wore the big, black hats and black overcoats that are their hallmark, along with long side curls (payots) and, when old enough, beards. Walking through the streets was like being instantly transported abroad:

prosaic Victorian north London had become exotic. I met an old friend for lunch. We were complete strangers to the area and took pot luck at the Grill on the Hill, a roughand-ready takeaway which advertised itself firmly and boldly as kosher. We sat at the back at the only table, and were given the kindest and warmest of welcomes by the cook. He had abandoned hat and overcoat in favour of bare head and shirtsleeves because of the heat. He promised us a delicious lunch, even though it would not be gourmet food. He was true to his word: his chicken kebabs were perfect and we had

a lovely time. When we left, he thanked us for coming and, looking hard at me, said what a privilege it had been to have me in his restaurant. This struck me as very touching, and it could not have happened had we not made it perfectly clear by the way we were both dressed that we belonged to different, very old religious traditions. Although I am an enclosed nun, I am well aware of the importance of interfaith exchange, yet this was the first time that I had actual experience of it. It made me realise how essential it is that the world should grasp that those who take their faith seriously, even though they come from different religions, cultures and convictions, have a lot of common ground. Good manners, kindness and hospitality are what one expects from one’s friends. These same attributes, coming from total strangers, are not only a delight but also evidence of a respect that can, alas, be so lacking in public and private places and in the media. They are God-given.

Memorial Service

Sir Nicholas Goodison (1934-2021) Sir Nicholas Goodison was Chairman of the Stock Exchange, a collector of clocks and a major benefactor of the arts. In his address at St Martin-in-the Fields, the Bishop of Salisbury, Rt Rev Nicholas Holtam, told of how instrumental Sir Nicholas was in chairing the Arts Advisory Panel in the Trafalgar Square church: ‘Nicholas ensured we set high standards. He said good art creates controversy. It was stimulating and it was fun. He was extraordinarily supportive about a broad variety of issues, including giving me a marvellous 42 The Oldie August 2022

tutorial on the banking crisis in 2008 over tea in the Athenaeum.’ The Bishop told how the arts panel replaced the Christmas crib in Trafalgar Square, which was trashed by the crowds celebrating England’s victory in the 2003 Rugby World Cup. Then they replaced the simple blue cross – the best they could do after a wartime bomb blew out the church’s Victorian stained-glass windows. The Bishop said, ‘Very skilful chairmanship was needed to get agreement for the successful window by Shirazeh Houshiary and Pip Horne. We commissioned a poem by Andrew

Motion. It was Nicholas who identified the lines from it – that engage the passer-by – around the rail of the light well to the new crypt. ‘Nicholas had strong views and he was very clear that he did not like the flowers in the sanctuary nor the siting of the baby in stone on the portico, but he was also pragmatic and he accepted that he couldn’t always move what others loved.’ In his tribute, Charles SebagMontefiore said of Sir Nicholas, ‘He had a glittering career in the City of London and an equally distinguished parallel life as a scholarly art historian and writer. He was a giant in so many worlds; a true polymath who more than succeeded in everything he did.’ JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW

The Doctor’s Surgery

Eating carrots is healthy – in moderation You can have too much of a good thing theodore dalrymple

Everyone knows that eating carrots is good for you and enables you to see in the dark. This is because the beta-carotene in carrots is converted into Vitamin A, a deficiency of which results in, among other things, night blindness. My introduction to health crankery, other than my grandmother’s belief in the life-preserving qualities of castor oil once a week, was through carrots. But I was not yet qualified when a baby was brought to hospital who was carrotcoloured: that is to say, carrot-coloured through and through – not just the hair. The reason for this was simple. The parents believed that, since Vitamin A is necessary, it must also be sufficient. They fed the poor mite nothing but carrot juice and, in the delicate term we doctors use, it failed to thrive. It was time for a little health education, given by the professor in no uncertain terms.

It is quite a common delusion that if a little bit of something does you good, a lot of it must do you much better. Homoeopathists suffer from an opposite delusion. If a drug has an effect, smaller and smaller doses of it must have a stronger effect, until you reach the most powerful dosage or dilution of all, when not a single molecule of the drug remains. Then its power is positively explosive. There is a widespread belief among normal people that beta-carotene, found in many fruits and vegetables besides carrots, exerts a beneficial effect through its anti-oxidative effect. Many people therefore take it as a supplement, though there is no need to if they eat a tolerably varied diet. When I put the word ‘beta-carotene’ into Google, up popped 25 brands of such supplements (among the

24,600,000 results). Several of the names nodded to the see-in-the-dark trope: Visionace Max, Macu Pro [Macu curtsying to the retinal macula], and Retinex Eye Health Support. The name of one brand, Puritan’s Pride, is of some cultural significance. The notion of purity has been removed from the moral and religious sphere to the nutritional. After all, we are what we eat. I had a discussion with a cousin about that idea many years ago, when I was still an adolescent. He went straight from being a criminal under suspended sentence for illegal possession of a firearm (and threats to use it) to vegetarianism without, as we players of Monopoly used to say, passing Go. He said that if you ate meat, you became psychologically and intellectually like the animal you ate. ‘And if you eat cabbage?’ I asked. I was an irritating youth. Let us return to beta-carotene. There is some evidence that, as an antioxidant, it reduces the chances of developing some cancers. Still, a high level increases the chances of lung cancer in smokers. Some have thought it also reduces the risk of heart disease. A study in China examined the levels of beta-carotene among 3,107 type-2 diabetics and followed them up for an average of 14 years. There were 441 cardiac deaths among them during that time. The risk of death among those with the highest levels of beta-carotene, after controlling for quite a number of possible confounding factors, was more than twice the average. As usual, further research needs to be done and these results duplicated. But these findings do at least suggest that supplements of beta-carotene for type-2 diabetics might be unwise. As for me, I shall continue to eat up my carrots, as I have always done: in moderation. The Oldie August 2022 43

The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk To sign up for our e-newsletter, go to www.theoldie.co.uk

Let me wear shorts SIR: Liz Hodgkinson (‘Farewell to frumps’, Spring issue) can take a proverbial running jump. I am having to spend increasing amounts of good weather seeing rolls and rolls of appalling fat waddling along the street, just about encased in strapless gowns, on the backs of monumentally obese women of all ages. If in those circumstances, she objects to a slimmish 78-year-old like me wearing shorts, tough! Yours truly, Edward Thomas, Eastbourne, East Sussex

Alcoholic: a definition SIR: Professor John Sutherland (‘I used to be well read’, July issue) is no doubt an expert on 19th-century literature, but he sadly misquotes 20th-century poet Dylan Thomas, whose definition of an alcoholic is widely agreed to be ‘An alcoholic is someone you don’t like, who drinks as much as you do,’ which seems more witty. Perhaps the Professor is confusing the anonymous definition ‘An alcoholic is someone who drinks more than his doctor.’ (Dr) David Syme, Killin, Perthshire

Hotline to Whitehall SIR: Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s article ‘I’ve got your number’ (July issue)

reminded me of the time, just over 20 years ago, I found a wallet on a London street. I wanted to hand it in, but didn’t know where there was a police station. I telephoned a general number which I had got from a directory. They advised me to telephone a number that ended 1212. I was tickled to think that Whitehall 1212 still lived. I am sure we oldies remember the wireless announcements and roadside message boards advising Mr so-and-so to contact Whitehall 1212 because a relative was dangerously ill. Stephen Cooke, Wells, Somerset

Hebridean phone exchange SIR: Ysenda Maxtone-Graham’s memories (‘I’ve got your number’, July issue) remind me of my parents’ threedigit 220 number. I recall phoning a relative who lived on a Hebridean island when you had to be connected by the local telephone exchange. When I asked to be put through, I was told that they were both out at the shop! Roderic Mather, Skipton, North Yorkshire

Conservative Ronnie Biggs SIR: Ronnie Biggs did not need to ‘avoid capture’ in Brazil, (‘My secret uncle’, July issue). Britain did not have an extradition treaty with that country. Among his business activities there, Biggs sold T-shirts with the slogans ‘Rio:

a great place to escape to’ and ‘I went to Rio and met Ronnie Biggs – honest!’. He also arranged barbecues at his house, charging tourists £40 to attend. In 1985 the veterans side of Huntingdon Rugby Club toured Brazil. They met Biggs for a convivial evening and a long night. Under the headline ‘Dinner with train robber’, the local paper, the Hunts Post, reported gushingly on the occasion, including a front-page photograph of Biggs with some of the touring party. Among those in the photo was the Chairman of the Huntingdon Conservative Association. Sincerely, Roy Shutz, Lower Dean, Huntingdon

The Torquay Armada SIR: I was interested to read David Horspool’s account (History, July issue) of the Spanish Armada, the ships of which, he stated, ‘sailed past Cornwall and anchored off Calais’. One galleon that did not make it past Devon, however, was the Nuestra Señora del Rosario, the flagship of the Andalusian squadron, which was captured and escorted into Torbay. A letter to the Privy Council, dated 27th July 1588, informed, ‘There is almost foure hundred sowldyers and marryners all wch for dyvers respectes wee have taken out of the shipp and brought them under saf gard unto the shoore.’ In fact, they were imprisoned in awful conditions in a medieval tithe barn attached to Torre Abbey in Torquay, which to this day is called the Spanish Barn. The surviving prisoners were eventually ransomed and returned to Spain, although the ghost of one who did not get home is said still to haunt the old place today. Jack Critchlow, Torquay, Devon

Venus’s belly button

‘I didn’t even know there was a zombie Barbie’

44 The Oldie August 2022

SIR: The Ancient Greek poet Hesiod described how Venus (ref ‘Botticelli’s pin-up’ by Nigel Goodman, July issue) was born fully grown from the sea and blown to the shore on a scallop shell. So why in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus is she depicted with a belly button? Peter Gilbert, Thames Ditton, Surrey

Botticelli’s Welsh pin-up SIR: Fascinating to read about Botticelli’s ‘pin-up’, Caterina (Nigel Goodman, July issue). I’d previously assumed she was Welsh, thanks to the old clerihew: Sandro Botticelli Had a studio in Pwllheli. You can still find his frescoes On a wall behind Tesco’s. Martin Brown, Coventry, Warwickshire

‘Luckily the X-ray has revealed the cause of your blinding headaches’

A place for commonplaces SIR: Simon O’Hagan’s article on commonplace books (Olden Life, July issue) has triggered a tsunami of memories, and I hope it’s not too late for me at 83 to start one. Matthew Norman’s Grumpy Oldie Man article in July’s issue will be one of the first to go in – it had me howling with laughter at the thought of staggering to an Underground station in search of a defibrillator. A bit macabre, but that’s my sort of humour too. Entries would be nearly all humorous – from the late greats Miles Kington and Alan Coren to current writers such as Gyles Brandreth and Maureen Lipman, with a healthy dose of ‘pomes’ from Pam Ayres and Gervase Phinn. My WI branch has a grandly named Literary Lunch monthly, where a few of us find something around a theme to read to the group. It’s amazing the diversity of items found – so that would be another rich seam to mine. Thanks so much, Simon – I’m off to buy a large scrapbook. Kind regards, Ann Buxton, High Wycombe, Bucks

Joy of scrapbooks SIR: I read Simon O’Hagan’s article (Olden Life, July issue) with interest. I keep a commonplace book. It is part scrapbook, part diary, part receptacle of favourite things I don’t want to lose. Poems, hymns, press cuttings, old invitations, miscellanea. I hope it will give my descendants a flavour of what I was like. It is great fun to do. Alice Cleland, Devizes, Wiltshire

Escape to London SIR: May I, via your estimable pages, express my heartfelt support for Penelope Hicks and her rant (July issue) against the irritating assumption that living in the countryside is invariably preferable to town life. Having spent numerous years living in rural and coastal areas, I am now oh so very happy to live in London. Buses at my

door to take me anywhere I wish to go for nothing, parks to wander through; cinemas, theatres, galleries, museums, restaurants and shops all close at hand. It is joyous. In fact, I hereby challenge all television-programme-makers to commission a series called Escape to the City. Go on, I double dare you. Just remember, when it is, undeniably, a huge success – the idea was mine. Kind regards, Angela Saul, London SW2

Double bass SIR: James Pembroke’s friend Will (Restaurants, July issue) is a fisherman who perhaps doesn’t know all his fish. The sea bass and sea bream are so named to distinguish them from their freshwater namesakes, called simply bass and bream – also eminently edible. Yours, John Franklin, London N1

Life can be full at 70 SIR: I was astonished to read Virginia Ironside’s advice to a 70-year-old woman who felt isolated and somewhat rejected by friends after the pandemic (July issue). Her message suggests that life for an older single female is inevitably bleak and empty and one has to accept this fate. As one septuagenarian to another, I urge FR from Newcastle to look for more sociable, inspiring activities than solitary jigsaws and tapestries. Are there local societies she could join? What about u3a? For travel, there are companies that specialise in breaks in this country and abroad. For ‘more mature’ single travellers I recommend One Traveller. You are well looked-after and I’ve always met friendly, like-minded people. I now go away with friends I’ve made on these tours. Next year I’ll celebrate my 77th birthday in the Galápagos Islands on a Saga holiday with one of them. And I still

have enough energy and a sense of adventure, contrary to Virginia’s dire predictions. I urge the correspondent to try to be positive. Single women have many more opportunities these days, whatever their age. And, as the Queen has said, ‘You are as old as you feel.’ Catherine Allport, Harborne, Birmingham

Ukrainian beauty SIR: I agree wholeheartedly with Ada Wordsworth (‘My war of words’, July issue) about the beauty of the Ukrainian language compared with Russian. I worked in Kiev in the 1980s in a visa office full of interpreters who spoke both Russian and Ukrainian as needed. I spoke neither when I arrived, but soon learned to distinguish them – long before I could understand either. I used to take great pleasure in telling one particular interpreter – daughter of a KGB officer and very Russian leaning – how harsh Russian was to hear compared with Ukrainian. As you can imagine, she loved hearing that – and it was absolutely true. I loved hearing the Ukrainian language enough to marry a Ukrainian-speaking and very Ukrainian-leaning interpreter. I now have two British children who understand everything said to them in Ukrainian and are trying to become fluent in speaking it too. The school they both attended offers such largely – or entirely – bilingual children the chance to take a GCSE in the language they use at home, but, sadly, Ukrainian is not a language offered anywhere at GCSE. It follows that I support Ada’s intention to support the promotion of Ukrainian culture in Slavonic studies, and I hope this will spill over into at least one board’s offering GCSE Ukrainian. After, all the Russian invasion has led to a larger – and growing – Ukrainian population in this country. Kind regards, Dave Rolls, Camberley, Surrey The Oldie August 2022 45

I Once Met

Terry Wogan ‘Almost legible.’ Those were the first words Sir Terry Wogan addressed to me and they came as something of a relief. It was 1985. We were in the greenroom of the BBC television theatre on Shepherd’s Bush Green and I had just completed my first live broadcast of his thrice-weekly TV chat show, as cue-card underling. My task was to write up the questions on large boards and hold them up in his eyeline. Their being legible, if only almost, was fundamental to the job. ‘Christy,’ he said to me later – he always called me Christy – ‘did you enjoy the cards?’ ‘Very much.’ ‘Well, we’ll soon put a stop to that.’ He never did. There followed eight years of fun working with the most likeable man in television. Operating the cue cards was a humble calling but I never missed a show. Terry and I developed a bond. My favourite moments were when I found myself alone with Terry in his dressing room before a show. The producers, researchers and make-up people had come and gone and there was that calm before the storm. We would chat idly about this and that. We talked of cars. ‘The E-Type Jag is a wonderful car,’ he said. ‘The devil to

Old Masters: Connery, Faldo & Wogan, 1990

drive, mind. But you feel good sitting in one.’ We talked about my father, with whom I had a strained relationship. ‘Make it up with your dad,’ Terry told me. ‘They’ll be no one else like him and you’ll miss him once he’s gone.’ Thanks to Terry, I was able to make it up with my dad by introducing him to his favourite performer, Ken Dodd. We talked of marriage, a distant prospect for me at the time. ‘Christy, my lad,’ he said, ‘get yourself a wife. It’ll stop you thinking about yourself and you’ll feel all the better for it.’ We talked of golf. ‘Favourite player?’ I asked him. ‘Seve Ballesteros.’ I complained about water hazards.

‘Ah, it’s the trees for me,’ Terry said. ‘I can never get out from behind a tree.’ Terry loved his golf. He rarely got starstruck but I could sense his excitement when keen golfer and James Bond star Sean Connery and double US Masters champion Nick Faldo came on the show together. The logistics meant I had to hold the heavy cue card completely still, just above the back of the famously irascible Sean Connery’s slightly balding head, and I could see a glint in Terry’s eye. ‘I was waiting for you to drop the card on Sean Connery’s head,’ he said afterwards, laughing. ‘He’d have ripped you limb from limb on live telly!’ During the show, Faldo let Terry don his Masters green jacket (pictured). ‘I finally knew how it felt to be Seve Ballesteros,’ said Terry with a sigh of pleasure. ‘Or Craig Stadler [the portly American golfer]?’ I suggested. ‘Be off with you, you young whippersnapper!’ cried Terry. Terry Wogan’s last words to me? Many years later, he gave me a cover quote for my book I Never Knew That About Ireland. ‘A treasure trove of unknown delights.’ And then he added, ‘Much like you, Christy.’ I miss him. Christopher Winn

Joanna Lumley in the bath – in a wig

In 1969, I was 23. I was in my final year of a three-year diploma in photography and film production at the Regent Street Polytechnic. The late film director Gavin Millar (1938-2022) was producing a series of documentaries for TV on education in the arts. For one programme, three London film schools were invited to take part, including us. Each film school produced a five-minute scene, made from an identical script. The 46 The Oldie August 2022

same two actors would play the boyfriend and girlfriend protagonists; location and interpretation were left to us. I was one of the lucky six or so students to be chosen as crew. This might have been because I was the only female student in my year. The actress playing the girlfriend was Joanna Lumley. We explained to her that we were going to manipulate the script to include two female parts, one of which would require her to wear a wig. The drama involved a lovers’ tiff. At the end of it, we chose to let the girlfriend storm out, leaving the boyfriend, the viewer was led to believe, in the lurch – only to reveal that, all the time, another girl had

been in the bath. This was Joanna in her wig. Joanna, of course, saw straight through the students’ wily intentions to feature a naked woman and was not going to oblige. Towels were used and undies worn. It was my job to get a suitable wig. In contrast to Joanna’s long, blonde hair, it was short, mousy and neatly cut in a Mary Quant style. As soon as each day’s filming was complete and I was on my way home, I would put the wig on over my long, dark hair and feel instantly elevated to stardom. After my graduation, I became assistant to Desmond Groves, portrait photographer at Harrods. There I spent long hours in

the dark room, developing hundreds of black-and-white 120 films, with occasional forays into the studio, where I assisted Len, who did children’s portraits when Mr Groves was away. Len trained me to take Polaroid photographs for top people’s passports, at £1 for four. The sitter I remember best is Vanessa Redgrave. It amused us all that a prominent member of the Workers Revolutionary Party came shopping in Harrods. By Susan Bond, Wareham, Dorset, who receives £50 Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past

Books Fantastic Mr Dahl In his new biography, Matthew Dennison unearths a rule-breaking, generous, self-aware genius

BEN MARTIN / GETTY

‘I

’m a perfectly ordinary fellow, except that I happen to be very tall,’ Roald Dahl told a group of children in 1975. He was indeed large. At his public school, Repton, Dahl was unusual in the early 1930s in being six foot five by his mid-teens. It was one reason – alongside his broken voice – that he was chosen for the hero’s part in a class reading of Romeo and Juliet. His size became central to Dahl’s identity. Repeatedly – and for better, as well as worse – his sense of his own bigness coloured his engagement with the world, shaped his expectations, forged a feeling of entitlement and even vainglory, and contributed to his considerable glamour as a young man and the imaginative bravado of his writing for children. Sometimes, it isolated him. ‘When you’re my size, you have everything against you. It’s very hard to get on with other people,’ he once complained. Any regret, however, was at best fleeting. His claim to ordinariness, by contrast, was mostly disingenuous. It was a statement made in self-defence to an audience likely to conflate Willy Wonka with his creator – and be disappointed by the latter’s crumpled and premature ageing. That was the legacy of a wartime flying accident which, in 1940, had nearly killed him and, decades later, left him ‘with two steel 48 The Oldie August 2022

With daughters Tessa and Olivia, 1960

hips and a spine that is beginning to act up on me after six laminectomies’. ‘A writer, when you meet him, is not in the least bit like the books he writes,’ Dahl told those children in 1975. It was a case of managing expectations. On that occasion, he explained, his ordinariness consisted of not having ‘fiery eyes and a green moustache’, or ‘ink all over his clothes’. All of which was obviously true. But, in other ways, as he was well aware, ‘very tall’ Dahl was anything but

ordinary: larger even than life, assertive, dominant, impatient of what he dismissed in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator as ‘what-iffing’, out of sympathy with mundanity. ‘Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it,’ he would insist in Matilda, a tidied-up version of his own headstrong mantra. The primacy in his outlook of ‘getting away with it’ points to his determination to dodge ‘ordinary’ rules and evade constraints and boundaries. Part of the exhilaration of his children’s fiction is its defeat of the everyday. ‘I got it all wrong,’ he commented of his first draft of Matilda. He identified his mistakes: ‘The parents were normal. No good. The school was ordinary. No good.’ This rejection of the commonplace was central to Dahl’s philosophy – sometimes pursued in his own life ebulliently; at other times more cantankerously. It did not always make him or those closest to him happy: wives, children, sisters, editors. It shaped the distinctive point of view of his many short stories written for adults, which, as their 1970s rebranding indicated, revel in the unexpected, often in the form of dark caprice. In a remarkable story written in the late 1950s, Dahl imagined Hitler’s infancy from the perspective of the dictator’s parents. He described Hitler’s

QUENTIN BLAKE

Roald Dahl by Quentin Blake, the illustrator of his books

father as ‘arrogant, overbearing, bullying’ – all adjectives at times ascribed to Dahl himself. More simply, his son Theo, aged only three, labelled Dahl ‘just a wasps’ nest’. It has become fashionable to vilify Dahl; in the words of one critic, to castigate his ‘grandiosity, dishonesty, and spite’ and picture him ‘crashing through life like a big, bad child’. Criticism of this sort seems certain to increase, as the opinions of a man born in 1916 into a hybrid Norwegian-Welsh offshoot of the upper-middle classes become increasingly antithetical to newer sensibilities. Little matter that most of these unsympathetic views are absent from the children’s fiction on which Dahl’s legend is built – or that intimations of so-called

‘grandiosity’ might be permissible for a writer whose sales in the year before his death exceeded 2.3 million books in Britain alone. Dahl’s ‘grandiosity’ might as easily be celebrated as his sumptuousness: his lavish collecting of orchids, Château Lafleur, paintings by Russian supremacists and Francis Bacon; the blue and green budgerigars with which he filled the orchard of his Buckinghamshire farmhouse, Gipsy House; the onions he grew by the hundred. His father Harald was a onearmed Norwegian émigré, who made a fortune from shipbroking in south Wales. On his death, when Roald was three and a half, he left the equivalent of £7 million to his widow and six children. Parts of Dahl’s childhood basked in

the drawn-out sunset of plutocratic Georgian England. Some of Dahl’s own instincts were similarly plush and expansive in scale. He showered his sisters with ‘sacks full of presents’ long after they had married. Asleep, he was prey to ‘dreams of glory’. In later life, he craved honours that were denied him – notably a knighthood. His view of himself, however, suggests he was acutely self-aware. In a short story from 1951, called My Lady Love, My Dove, Dahl’s diminutive narrator, Arthur, tells readers, ‘I myself do not like tall men.’ They are, he explains, ‘apt to be supercilious and omniscient’. Matthew Dennison’s Roald Dahl: Teller of the Unexpected is published by Head of Zeus on 4th August The Oldie April 2022 49

The Celtic myth ROGER LEWIS The Celts: A Sceptical History By Simon Jenkins Profile Books £16.99 I’ve never much gone for Celtic mythology – mists, caverns, waterfalls, elf maidens and hairy warriors and what Simon Jenkins calls ‘dimwits clad in druidical garb’, sporting ornate buckles and brooches. It is an over-romanticised vision or version of our pre-history, ‘a magic bag into which anything can be tossed’, in the words of Tolkien. As Jenkins shows, when the concept of a Celtic society is investigated, it turns out nothing actually existed, in any place. ‘There has never been found a distinct people, race or tribe claiming the name or language of Celtic.’ DNA analysis on an ancient Welsh skeleton showed it to be Swiss, ‘with a tooth abscess and a gammy leg’. Instead of the wars and invasions of legend – wicked Saxons pushing the redoubtable Celts into the remote mountainous regions – actual science and archaeology suggest people from France, Spain and Portugal less dramatically travelled to our islands for reasons of trade; plus there was the ‘migration of herdsmen and huntergatherers, moving with the seasons’. There were also religious preachers, ‘each with his bell, his well, and his special powers over birds and beasts’ – you can see how easily the fanciful creeps in. Though this is harmless for the most part – Napoleon ‘imagined himself a latter-day Celtic emperor’; Wagner (Jenkins doesn’t mention this) visited Wales and Cornwall when researching Parsifal; Victoria and Albert revived tartan and bagpipes at Balmoral, ‘a supposedly Celtic brand under the sponsorship of a Saxon monarch’ – when ‘prejudices and misconceptions’ take hold, nationalism has a resurgence. Though the Celtic ideal is a fabrication, it is nevertheless ‘dangerous in the hands of

‘Should we not be trying to get back to some kind of normal?’

English caricatures, clockwise from top left: Welsh harpist in despair; Bonnie Scots piper; satisfied John Bull; Irish leprechaun From The Celts: A Sceptical History by Simon Jenkins (Profile, £16.99)

separatists’, which is to say people who take themselves seriously – like the authoritarian politicians who suddenly started making Gaelic and Welsh compulsory, with the consequence that ‘Young people are forced to learn in a language they are most unlikely to use at home, work or play.’ At this point, Jenkins’s erudite volume turns into a compact recapitulation of what went on in Ireland, Scotland and Wales from the year dot up until the other day, with Cornwall, Brittany and the Isle of Man thrown in. Even an Iron Age site in Hallstatt, Austria, is mentioned (several times) – that’s down the road from Bad Ischl, my home in Austria. Does this mean instead of being in haughty exile I have inadvertently returned to my roots? Jenkins accounts for the Romans in Britain and Viking longships – ‘the angry menace of the oars’. DNA evidence ‘gives modern Shetland an almost 50 per cent Norse ancestry’ – so that’s raping and pillaging for you. Norman castles in Wales are still considered by the Tourist Board ‘symbols of English oppression’. And the Welsh sense of gloom and resentfulness has impressively lasted since the Middle Ages, even if most Welsh people have family from (and in) adjacent cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol.

On the other hand, ‘the castles of Scotland were built by Scotsmen’, as they had enough to do fighting ‘against each other’. I was amused to discover the name Brecon comes from an Irish chieftain, Broccan – what was he doing in the Black Mountains? (I tell you who I used to see riding his motorbike near Brecon – Dutch actor Rutger Hauer.) When Jenkins, with a straight face, mentions Gruffydd ap Llewelyn of Gwynedd, Princess Nest, daughter of Rhys of Deheubarth, a descendant of Hywel Dda, and Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn of Powys, I did think, is he conceivably pulling our leg? MacAlpin of Dalriada and Angus Og also sound straight out of Monty Python. We are told about the tragic effects of the Civil War on the Celtic fringe; the Highland clearances; the devastation of Ireland through famine and sectarian massacres. I am not, generally speaking, a stupid person, but mentions of the Treaty of Woodstock, the Treaty of Montgomery and the Treaty of Perth, with associated wrangles, quite defeated me. More in my line is Dafydd ap Gwilym (c 1315–50), who wrote an erotic poem ‘in praise of his penis’. Jenkins concludes by mentioning a conversation he had with loopy old transsexual Jan Morris. It’s a The Oldie August 2022 51

conversation I had with her, too, many times, and I loved Jan. She very firmly held the nonsensical belief that the myths and legends of a glorious Celtic past were ‘potent facts’, to be given full credence. She didn’t want historical actuality to blight her sentimental notions – daylight let in on magic, so to speak. Jan dreamt of an independent Wales, with separate border controls and its own currency and legislature. I seem to recall the capital city was to be Porthmadog. This is no more of a pipe dream than what Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon want for Scotland. We have always been loosely federated. The United Kingdom has been called that only since 1801, with Northern Ireland added in 1922. But it is an angry false memory to say we remain uneasily divided, every ill attributable to ‘conquest, colonisation and annexation’ by the evil English. The truth is legacies are mixed, a result of our being a composite people, with blood from here, there and everywhere in our veins. I’m glad Jenkins makes the point that ‘to speak English does not make someone any less Irish, Scottish or Welsh’. Three hearty cheers for his saying that. I only wish Jenkins had included the Richard Burton story. ‘Are you Seltic?’ the great actor was once asked. Quick as a flash, Burton replied, ‘It’s pronounced Keltic, you sunt.’ Roger Lewis, raised in Bedwas, Monmouthshire, is writing Erotic Vagrancy, a joint biography of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Infamy! Infamy! MARY KENNY British Traitors: Betrayal and Treachery in the Twentieth Century By Gordon Kerr Oldcastle Books £9.99 There are many motivations for spying – and treachery – and four are listed in Gordon Kerr’s informative book: money, ideology, compromise and ego. There is another factor – confused background identities and, quite often, cosmopolitan experiences in the formative years. As one of the most compelling characters featured in this galère, George Blake, so shrewdly observed, ‘To betray, you must first belong.’ Blake himself was born in the Netherlands of a Jewish father who had fought for Britain. Growing up a Christian, hoping to be a priest, he was transplanted as a young teenager to Cairo, where he went to English and

French schools. Then he joined the Dutch Resistance, enlisted in the Royal Navy, was posted to Korea as a diplomat, became a Marxist, worked for MI6 and was a double agent for the Russians. In prison, he taught fellow jailbirds Arabic, French and German, while continuing as a translator from Dutch. Whether he ever felt he betrayed, he certainly never felt he belonged. Kim Philby, born in the Punjab, son of an Arabist and Islamic convert, and the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs – born in Germany, son of a Lutheran pastor – fall into a similar category. Internationalism wasn’t a defining characteristic, but it crops up as a feature among men – no women here – whose roots were not always stable. So does homosexuality, in the light of the criminal laws then. Kerr suggests that, accustomed to leading secret lives, gay men could more easily dissemble. That theory breaks down with Guy Burgess, who couldn’t have been less discreet, and was described by one of his lovers as ‘the most promiscuous person who ever lived. He slept with anything going.’ He was also an egregious drunk. Burgess still remains fascinating and, despite everything, really did love England. Donald Maclean, too, is strangely attractive – so clever, so anguished, so bisexual, so drunk, so committed a Communist. Anthony Blunt, for all his arty expertise and social connections – he was a cousin of the Queen Mother – seems a dull stick. While sharing some common motives, spies and traitors are a diverse group. Some of the small fry, who paid the rather high price of being hanged, were pathetic. John Amery, who went over to the Nazis, was mentally disturbed from childhood and wasn’t mentally fit to plead. Ronald Harwood wrote an excellent play about him, An English Tragedy, which is seldom performed – perhaps it’s too sympathetic to its subject. Others had a background in petty crime and were easy meat for the Soviets to buy or blackmail. This is an uneven book: some of the biographical profiles are substantial and wide-ranging, while others are brief and sketchy. This is partly because much more is known about characters such as William Joyce and John Cairncross than about Geoffrey Prime or Wilfred Macartney. Gordon Kerr has drawn on my biography of Lord Haw-Haw, since his material emphasises the Irish background detail I researched: we all use published sources and I don’t object to mine being helpful, but he could have

listed my book in his bibliography. Joyce was another who, legally, didn’t ‘belong’ and so betrayed: he was born in America, and was never a subject of the Crown. Some spies and traitors are simply more interesting than others. It’s hard to escape the element of glamour around the Cambridge spies, with their beguiling cocktail of a naïve belief in a Soviet Utopia, class, sex, alcohol, multiple marriages and divorces, complex friendships and interlocking loyalties, along with a sometimes sincere concern for the downtrodden proletariat. There’s still plenty of movie material here. An adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s book A Spy Among Friends, with Guy Pearce and Damian Lewis as Kim Philby and his pal Nicholas Elliott, will be shown on TV later this year. Surprising, in an era that now emphasises female ‘inclusivity’, that no women are featured – Melita Norwood, the ‘granny spy’, is a candidate. Another significant omission is Roger Casement, whose 1916 trial set a precedent for treason. He was regarded by the Irish as a brave (and gay) patriot, and by others as a hero who exposed odious slavery practices. Perhaps Casement is too complicated for inclusion. But then I suppose life is complicated, and some of the characters in this book might say they adhered, in the words of Duchess Meghan, to ‘their’ truth. Mary Kenny is author of Germany Calling: A Personal Biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw

The Leeds troubadour BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE Beware of the Bull: The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray By Paul Thompson and John Watterson Scratching Shed Publishing £20 The singer-songwriter Jake Thackray (1938-2002) might well have welcomed the obscurity into which he seems to have fallen. He called himself a ‘lousy guitar player’ and ‘a writer of doggerel’, avoided interviews and meant it when he said he despised celebrities who ‘fondle with fame’. Yet he became a household name in the 1960s and beyond, appearing regularly with guitar, roll-neck jumper and doleful demeanour on Braden’s Week, That’s Life! and other BBC programmes to deliver some of the wittiest, most imaginative songs I know. The Oldie August 2022 53

I remain a fan, proud that I gave him his first mainstream rave when I reviewed a Thackray gig for the Guardian in 1966. Even more so are Paul Thompson and John Watterson, authors of a biography of a soloist who, as they say, could be ‘hilarious, moving, satirical, irreverent, bawdy, anarchic, sometimes within the same song’. And that song might embody a story about anything from village bobbies to scallywags, jumble sales to the class divide, country buses to lonely spinsters, accident-prone relatives to a gun-happy USA. Thackray was born in 1938 and raised in semi-poverty in Leeds – ‘gaunt and greedy and grim in the face,’ he wrote, ‘unyielding, unlovely, a flat black place’ – the son of a policeman remembered as ‘a right grumpy old bruiser’ and the local priest’s sometime housekeeper. A neighbour recalled entering their tiny house to find her beating the old man with a coal scuttle as he tried to throttle Jake. However, it was her intensely-held Catholicism as much as her resilience that influenced him. He was a regular Mass-goer all his life, sometimes getting up after a bibulous night to be in church early the next day. Thackray was educated by Jesuits, flourishing enough to go to Durham University and become a schoolteacher. He taught in Leeds, and also in France and even in conflict-torn Algeria, absorbing the language and, crucially, discovering Georges Brassens. For him, the Frenchman was the greatest of song-composers, a maverick troubadour who became his great influence, a friend and someone he enticed to appear with him in a concert in Cardiff in 1973. By then, Thackray had been discovered playing in a Leeds pub by a BBC producer and lured onto television, a medium he hated. ‘A singer’s place is on the public floorboards,’ he said, ‘not ducking and weaving and smirking on a flickering rectangle.’ He also suffered badly from nerves, admitting he was terrified before facing an audience, especially in the large theatres his agents thought his due. One had to throw himself in front of the car in which Thackray tried to escape from a packed house in Croydon’s vast Fairfield Halls. He became increasingly disenchanted with the BBC, showbiz and what he called ‘mohair-coated men with their Aqua Velva smiles, maggots in their ears and crocodiles in their pockets’. Indeed, he 54 The Oldie August 2022

eventually dispensed with his agents and arranged appearances himself, in pubs and clubs only – a decision that contributed to the collapse of a marriage that produced three sons. I don’t think his biographers are exaggerating when they paint him as genial, generous, playful and fun: they also painstakingly report his decline into alcoholism, sickness and penury. He was always hopeless with money – his wife discovered a cache of old cheques, including one for £1,600, while he was being pursued for unpaid tax – and paid the price. He died in 2002, an amiable eccentric who lived in a council flat outside Monmouth and sometimes helped the local priest clean his church. ‘What’s funny about being a Catholic?’ he once asked himself during Mass and answered, ‘Everything’. Hence Sister Josephine, about a burglar who hides in a convent and is accepted as a nun despite his hairy hands, tattoos, cigars and habit of leaving loo seats upright. That was just one example of his mistrust of convention, pretension and pomposity. He was the author of many other agile, quirky lyrics and cheeky yet pointed songs: On Again, a mischievous tribute to garrulous women, culminating in a visit by a too-talkative Virgin Mary; The Ballad of Billy Kershaw, about the tiny yet sexually irresistible ploughman who gives himself only to ‘the ugly ones, the poorest, the despised, the dispossessed’; Joseph, which celebrates a simple carpenter puzzled by the arrival of three kings and lots of angels. Jake Thackray should be remembered and revived. If he is, it may be largely due to this thorough yet readable, affectionate yet critical and altogether absorbing biography. Benedict Nightingale was theatre critic of the Times

‘Before we start, can I suggest we take an early lunch ...’

Charles I’s brave widow PAUL LAY Henrietta Maria: Conspirator, Warrior, Phoenix Queen By Leanda de Lisle Chatto & Windus £25 The pattern for the life of Henrietta Maria, future queen of Charles I, was set before she was six months old – when her father, Henry IV of France, was assassinated in May 1610. A Huguenot, Henry was a Catholic convert, thinking Paris ‘worth a mass’, and become Bourbon ruler. But his alliance with Protestant powers against the mighty Catholic Habsburgs, whose territories encircled his kingdom, raised enmity among religious zealots such as his Catholic assassin, François Ravaillac. Bitter religious division was everywhere in 17th-century Europe. England’s Parliament had been spared destruction by a hair’s breadth in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The Continent would descend into internecine sectarian warfare in 1618 with the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, the greatest demographic catastrophe to afflict mainland Europe until the slaughter of the 20th century. Pity the princess born into such a world – a man’s one at that. Young women such as Henrietta Maria (1609-69), like her mother, Marie de Medici, before her (her parents were not terribly original when it came to naming their offspring), were little more than pawns in the dynastic chess games of Bourbon, Habsburg and beyond. A marriage alliance with the Stuarts, who had ruled Britain since 1601, offered a number of advantages to Bourbon France. Britain’s navy was the dominant force in the Channel and an effective counter against Habsburg forces in the Spanish Netherlands. Britain would also be neutered in its dealings with co-religionist Huguenots in south-west France, a source of instability. So when the future Charles I’s bizarre attempt to woo the Spanish Infanta came to an ignominious end in 1624, Henry Rich, the future Earl of Holland, and a keen opponent of Habsburg expansionism, put out feelers at the French court. The couple, who had first set eyes on each other when Charles turned up in Paris on his way to Madrid, married in 1625. Four years later, the headstrong Charles turned his back on a troublesome Parliament, inaugurating the 11 years of Personal Rule. At first, removed from the sophisticated Paris court, Henrietta Maria felt ‘very alone’ and ‘ill and depressed’. But she quickly adapted, and the 1630s became the ‘happiest period of her life’. She

posed for Rubens’s star pupil, Anthony van Dyck, while raising a young family. Henrietta Maria certainly passed the all-important fertility test – and five of her and Charles’s children reached maturity, and proved just as fertile. Unlike the Tudors, the Stuarts never had an issue reproducing – it was what they reproduced that was the problem. The savvy pragmatism that marked the rule of James I was sadly lacking in his successors. And Henrietta Maria became the focus of attacks from her husband’s numerous opponents. Her real crime, ‘for which she has yet to be forgiven’, contends Leanda de Lisle in this lucid, entertaining and combative revisionist biography, is that she exercised power in a man’s world ‘without apology’. The characteristic was compounded in the eyes of her enemies by the fact that, like her mother, she did so as a foreigner in the land of her husband. The power to change identity, in this case from French to English, led to accusations of witchcraft. And she did so as a thoughtful, devout Catholic in a Protestant realm. That realm was divided between ‘popish’ Anglicans, such as Charles and his archbishop William Laud, who were partial to ceremonial ritual and the prayer book and puritans – a broader spectrum than is often imagined. Their more extremist adherents practised a severe, unforgiving creed that saw enemies everywhere – especially at the court of a Catholic consort. It was Henrietta Maria’s unique misfortune to be paired with the increasingly authoritarian, politically tone-deaf Charles as England, Ireland and Scotland were torn apart by the civil war that broke out in 1642. From then on, she would earn the reputation as ‘the worst consort ever to have worn the crown of the three kingdoms’. Yet, De Lisle argues, Henrietta Maria played her poor hand with considerably more skill than posterity has given her credit for, particularly after Charles’s trial and execution in 1649. As the Cromwellian regime grew in stature, recognised by Europe’s great powers, Henrietta Maria kept the faith. She lived to see the miracle which ‘changed the hearts of the English people in an instant, from hate to love’, resulting in the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. It was as much her doing as her son’s. Her bloodline, as De Lisle points out, will be restored when Prince William (her descendant through Princess Diana) ascends to the throne. Paul Lay wrote Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate

East End jewels JEREMY MUSSON Survey of London: Whitechapel, Volumes 54 and 55 By Peter Guillery Yale University Press £150 Whitechapel, part of London’s East End, outside the City but deeply, densely urban, has had a long history of immigration. The Huguenots were most ungenerously described by the parish priest in the 1690s as ‘the very offal of the earth’ despite being highly skilled silk-weavers. They were followed by waves of Irish dock workers, Jewish tailors, South Asian garment workers and many more. Wealth and poverty are threaded through the history of Whitechapel’s crowded streets in surprising ways. The Survey of London’s two-volume account of this architectural and urban history is densely researched and well illustrated. Volume 54 is focused on the central part, along and around Whitechapel High Street; Volume 55 on areas to the south and north-east of this. Together, they reveal the stories of what the editor Peter Guillery calls ‘a dense and intricate palimpsest’ of buildings, shaped by a ‘fourdimensional tapestry’ of social identities. Every street is minutely assessed in terms of its architectural and urban form, and social and political history. The busy medieval high street was full of shops and houses, along the main route from London to Colchester. It boomed with the rise in trades excluded from the City boundaries, and a steady influx of people and commodities fed by the nearby docks. In around 1600, John Stow found the main road ‘pestered with Cottages, and Allies [alleys]’ on both sides. The 1680s marked ‘a key decade for the march of bricks of mortar’, with a fusillade of speculative developments. The march of bricks and mortar was unstoppable, with industrial and commercial components, including sugar-refining, distilling and the enduring rag trade of Brick Lane and Petticoat Lane markets – the latter street named for a trade in sex rather than clothes. As an academic recording exercise, the Survey of London has perhaps no parallel. It too began in the East End, in 1894, when Arts and Crafts architect C R Ashbee, horrified by the relentless destruction of historic buildings, recorded the survivors. The Survey has evolved gloriously into collections of detailed studies of each area of London. It makes an outstanding scholarly contribution to our record and understanding

of our capital city. Created by a crack team of historians at the Bartlett School of Architecture, its erudite and polished volumes appear on a regular basis. The current pair were preceded by a magnificent volume (53) on Oxford Street. A chapter in Volume 54 covers the original ‘white chapel’ which gave the place its name. It has long been known as St Mary Matfelon – after either a merchant of French origin or a French word for ‘knapweed’. Handsomely rebuilt in the 1670s, possibly to designs by Robert Hooke, the church was replaced by a fine Victorian rebuilding designed by E C Lee, a pupil of William Burges. The historic church was gutted by bombing in 1940 and the shell was cleared in 1952. The site became a park, now named Altab Ali Park, in memory of a 25-year-old British Bangladeshi murdered nearby, by three racist thugs, in 1978. Whitechapel has long been a place of transient people and shifting places and buildings. Many – now vanished – synagogues built for Jewish populations fleeing persecution in Europe and Russia are precisely and evocatively recorded here. There are sharply drawn, rigorously researched accounts of Whitechapel’s remarkable institutions: the famous Royal London Hospital – with the unfitted-out storeys of its newest building being hastily repurposed as COVID wards in 2020 – Wilton’s Music Hall, the East London Mosque and London Muslim Centre. The Whitechapel Art Gallery is one of the most fascinating buildings covered. Today, it incorporates the Passmore Edwards Whitechapel Free Library, completed in 1892, before the gallery was built. It was known as the ‘university of the ghetto’ for nourishing the ideas of local Jewish artists such as Mark Gertler and David Bomberg. The gallery grew from the high-minded vision of the Reverend Samuel Barnett, Rector of St Jude’s, Whitechapel, and his social reformer wife, Henrietta. They had already in 1883 founded Toynbee Hall, a residential settlement and centre for social work. Believing art would lift the spirits of the East End poor, counteracting the ‘paralysing and degrading sights of our streets’, they commissioned a building from the brilliant architect Charles Harrison Townsend. Opened in 1901, the building remains as cool as a sorbet in the face of many of the overweening office blocks in the area. It endures as an architectural landmark of a life-enhancing, philanthropic ambition. Jeremy Musson, former architectural editor of Country Life, is author of Kelmscott Manor (2022) The Oldie August 2022 57

Media Matters

Downfall of a hack Prime Minister Fleet Street didn’t train Boris for Downing Street stephen glover Boris Johnson’s demise will have attention span. Nor did he shed the provoked a wide range of responses natural ill-discipline of most hacks. He among readers. Some will mourn it, often skittered across the surface, though some will rejoice and others, like me, will he was able, when his imagination was be somewhere in between. fired up, to grasp a cause, Ukraine being Many of my feelings have to do with the obvious example. the fact that Boris is first and foremost a When that great politician and journalist. In some way, his fall from industrialist Joseph Chamberlain finally grace seems like a judgement on came unstuck, manufacturers of screws members of our trade. the world over must have felt a Of course numerous figures have sympathetic pang of regret. He was their straddled journalism and politics: man. So, as a journalist and columnist, Churchill, Brendan Bracken, Iain I feel about Boris. He was our man, for all Macleod, Ian Gilmour and Nigel Lawson, his weaknesses. Many of his bitterest foes to name a few. But such people have in the media – those who denigrate him usually been more interested in politics for even existing – have more in common than in journalism. Journalism was a with him, in temperament if not belief, means to an end. than they care to admit. With Boris it was different. I don’t deny that he set his eye at an early stage Auntie is very old – 100 in October. You on being Prime Minister rather than, say, might think she would show some editor of the Daily Telegraph. He once concern for oldies, but she doesn’t. explained his move into politics by Two years ago, the BBC started declaring, ‘They don’t put up statues charging people over 75 for a to journalists.’ All the same, he TV licence, except for those on pursued his journalistic career with pension credit. It argued that it brio and conviction. And he was had no alternative because the exceptionally good at it – surely Government had loaded it with one of the outstanding extra financial burdens. More columnists of his generation, than three million households though his detractors in the press were affected. will disagree. The latest evidence of the His experience as a foreign Beeb’s prejudice against older correspondent, editor and columnist people is its decision to put BBC4 gave him an advantage over other online by 2025. Although the politicians climbing the greasy television channel has been pole. He could talk to noteworthy BBC: anti-oldie deprived of resources in recent and powerful people not readily years, it still provides excellent accessible to humble rival politicos. And coverage of music and the arts, and he was able to nurture an interest in all carries superior thrillers. It is watched manner of things. He was well informed, largely by oldies. even if the knowledge he acquired was BBC4 costs £22 million a year, and the superficial – as it must be for all savings of putting it online – where fewer journalists addressing dozens of subjects. people will watch it – will be tiny. The Whereas the other journalists I have annual budget for BBC1, by comparison, mentioned learned to think and act like is £1.2 billion, according to the politicians, Boris went on being au fond a Corporation’s latest annual report. journalist. He never lost his short Meanwhile, earlier this year, Auntie

revived BBC3 on television, having put it online in 2016. Aimed at viewers aged 16-34, it specialises in elevated programmes such as Eating with My Ex and Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents. It has an annual budget of £80 million. Admittedly the Beeb is under financial pressure, not least because the Government has frozen the licence fee for two years. Savings have to be found somewhere. But why pick on BBC4, which even in its reduced state offers programmes of a quality not readily available elsewhere, while BBC3, which offers trashy fare that can be found on lots of other channels, is supported? Answer: Auntie may be old, but she much prefers younger people – even though very few of them watch television. Evgeny Lebedev’s close association with Boris Johnson has caused the outgoing Prime Minister mild embarrassment. Lebedev has problems of his own. The London Evening Standard, which he controls, has reported losses of £14 million for last year. Over the past five years, £70 million has gone south. Although during the pandemic the freesheet’s circulation plummeted, it has now largely recovered. But the advertising on which it depends has not. The paper has been forced to sack many journalists and now seems a poor, dull thing. I fear it can’t survive for long. In my last column, I stated that the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) has stopped issuing sales figures for its dwindling print edition. I wrote that I would be surprised if daily sales were much above 200,000. I am grateful to Matthew Webster, The Oldie’s Digital Life correspondent, for pointing out that TMG does, in fact, issue sales figures every month. The latest was 164,829, significantly lower than my guesstimate. The Oldie August 2022 59

History

Ricky goes to Hollywood

Richard III, the king in the car park, stars in a new film and exhibition david horspool Do you remember where you were when Chris Huhne pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice by making his wife take his speeding points? It was hardly a JFK moment, but I do remember, because the BBC, in their infinite wisdom, chose to interrupt an actual historic moment with this grave news, on 4th February 2013. I had been watching with some astonishment a press conference from the University of Leicester, during which it was announced that DNA testing on some bones discovered during the excavation of a Council car park had been confirmed as belonging to King Richard III. They had been there, undisturbed, since 1485. The dig was carried out by academic archaeologists, and they had not really been looking for Richard. That was the quest of amateur historian and Ricardian (rehabilitator of Richard’s reputation) Philippa Langley. She persuaded the co-director of the University of Leicester Archaeological Services, Richard Buckley, to undertake an excavation for a church, Greyfriars. She thought Richard’s remains might be there, not dug up and thrown in the River Soar, as some rumours had it. So the archaeologists were looking for a medieval church, not a missing king. On the very first day of the dig, the archaeologists found human bones, which, as they emerged from the mud piece by painstaking piece, turned out to display a marked curvature of the spine. A few months later, scientists confirmed that they belonged to Richard ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Langley had found her man. This is not how history, still less archaeology, is supposed to work. As Dr Buckley put it, the prospect of finding Richard III, listed as the fifth of five objectives for the dig, was ‘not seriously considered possible’. Compare another excavation in 2013, with the backing of two governments – those of the UK and Myanmar – for the 60 The Oldie August 2022

‘lost Spitfires of Burma’. This quest, too, had a committed amateur behind it, a Lincolnshire farmer called David Cundall. Searching for treasure buried less than a century before, the diggers in an airfield in Myanmar found nothing. The myth was just a myth – or maybe they were looking in the wrong place. There was something miraculous about the discovery of Richard, and it is no wonder that the story, with Langley at the centre of it, has been turned into a film, to be released later this year – directed by Stephen Frears, and starring Sally Hawkins (of Paddington fame) and Steve Coogan – The Lost King. And the Wallace Collection in London, which holds a version of Paul Delaroche’s unforgettable portrait of Richard III’s most famous alleged victims, the Princes in the Tower, is holding an exhibition in September to explore the ways in which film and theatre have reimagined the king over the centuries. In the course of researching a book about Richard, I came across Langley a handful of times. The first was in the public gallery at the Royal Courts of Justice, where she showed the kind of admirable disregard for convention that had served her so well as she got her project off the ground. The case was one of those publicity stunts brought by a group who argued that Richard should be buried in York rather than in Leicester, as the archaeologists had agreed in their initial application for permission to dig. As one of the barristers launched into a historical explanation, Langley became audibly distressed, saying, ‘No – that’s not right.’ I have seen enough courtroom dramas to know that the next words from the judge’s mouth should have been a warning that if there were any more outbursts from the gallery, she would have no hesitation in clearing the court. Instead she looked up and said, ‘Since it’s you’ – or words to that effect – and

The King & I: Philippa Langley & Richard III

ordered a brief adjournment so that Langley could make her point. The discovery of Richard’s bones had turned a harmless crank into an acknowledged expert witness. The next time I saw her was at the reinterment of the king at Leicester Cathedral. There, in that peculiar atmosphere – half Disney, with mounted knights (including the Curator of Arms and Armour at the Wallace Collection, Dr Tobias Capwell) and half state funeral, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Countess of Wessex and a dressing-upboxful of funny hats – was Langley, all in black, mourning the king she had conjured from the tarmac. Thanks to the archaeologists she had set in motion, we now know that Langley’s man was not hunchbacked. His twisted spine was a consequence of scoliosis, a far less noticeable or debilitating condition. That meant he could have been the all-action warrior that contemporary sources portrayed and Ricardians champion. Of course it couldn’t tell us anything about his crimes or his right to sit on the throne at all. The story of Good King Richard may be as far-fetched as ever. But as Giordano Bruno put it, in a work written exactly 100 years after Richard’s death, ‘Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato.’ The Lost King is out on 7th October David Horspool is author of Richard III: A Ruler and His Reputation (Bloomsbury)

Johnny Grimond: Words and Stuff

A Doric column from Scotland

TOM PLANT

Gaelic seems to be flourishing. More than 1.1 million people have been learning Gaelic on a website called Duolingo since the start of the pandemic. I am not among them. There’s certainly something romantic about Gaelic – a language with all its letters named after trees can’t be altogether bad – and I’m happy that others should learn it if they want to have a blether in the heather. But it’s not for me. In truth, my heart sinks even when I’m confronted with a poem in dialect: have I got to look at the footnotes to understand it? Yet I’ve just read a book in dialect that has been sitting unopened on my shelves for over 50 years, and I loved it. Sunset Song, by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is rated by many as the finest Scottish novel of the 20th century. A large part of its excellence, say some, lies in its use of Doric, the dialect of the Grampian region – particularly of the Mearns, another name for the old county of Kincardineshire. Of course a large part of its neglect also lies in its use of Doric. This is a novel with a glossary – if you’re lucky in the edition you buy. Sceptics may now be thinking that some jookery-packery is going on here. Surely there is no such language as Doric in the British Isles. Knowledgeable sceptics may know of Scots, the language of the Lowlands. They may even know of Lallan, vernacular Lowland Scots. Robert Louis

Complicated car keys Remote car keys are the work of the devil. They don’t make life better. They make it more complicated, expensive and frustrating. A simple key is a wonderful bit of kit. Key. Lock. Put the two together. Turn. Job done. Proper keys do not need batteries, big red buttons,

Stevenson wrote in English, Scots and Lallan. Orkney and Shetland each have a dialect derived from Norn, an old language spoken in Norway and its colonies about 1,000 years ago. But the ancient language of most of Scotland is Gaelic. Well, yes and no. Gaelic (pronounced Gallick, incidentally, not Gaylick) came from Ireland to Scotland in the third, fourth and fifth centuries AD. It was the main language of the Highlands and the west of Scotland in the Middle Ages, before fading in the late-18th century. Scots was the name given to the variant of English spoken in the Lowlands in the late-15th century. It was previously known as Inglis. Doric – yes, it really does exist – seems to have appeared as a name for a rustic dialect in the 18th century. It was used in England but more widely in Scotland – especially the Lowlands – though now it is confined mostly to the Grampian north-east. How did this dialect come to be called Doric? The usual explanation is that the name was given to the vernacular spoken by Lowland Scots in ironic contrast to the more sophisticated ‘Attic’ language current in the ‘Athens of the North’ – as Edinburgh was sometimes known. The poet Allan Ramsay is credited with coining the term Doric when, in 1721, he compared his use of Scots to the lyric poet Theocritus’s use of the Greek Doric. Theocritus chose to write in the Doric dialect, though the Doric style

codes, microchips or transponders. A broken or lost traditional car key can be replaced with modest outlay. But remotes can cost hundreds – even thousands – to replace. If you can even get one… And the only benefit of all this complexity is that you can open your car without taking your key out of your pocket. Well, however did we manage before? And, with your hands still in your pockets, how do you open the car-door handle? Despite all that technology, thefts of keyless cars have soared. Manufacturers

of architecture was the oldest and simplest of the ancient Greek orders (the others being Ionic and Corinthian). The Doric of the Mearns is very different from the Doric of the Peloponnese. It’s not clear even whether it is a language or a dialect. Aberdeen University calls it a language in the description of its Doric course. But to read Doric is often just to read Scots English with some unfamiliar words, many of them simply archaic. Sunset Song is not written in Doric. The characters’ speech is colloquial, the rhythms often follow spoken dialect, and uninitiated readers will have some guessing to do if they are not to resort to the glossary. But Grassic Gibbon spoke of ‘speech’, not ‘Doric’. Similarly, the excellent Poetry of Northeast Scotland (1976), a pretty comprehensive anthology, makes no mention of Doric. That does not mean the local dialect of this part of Scotland isn’t rich. Word-lovers such as Ivor Brown have long sung the praises of Grassic Gibbon’s literature, particularly his use of words such as dander (wander) and lithe (lee). The Grampian canon runs from Byron and professors of Greek to illiterates, and includes a high proportion of Scotland’s ballads. Many, like The Bonnie Lass o’ Fyvie and The Barnyards o’ Delgaty, are full of local references. Yet they are no more difficult than other Scottish ballads – and much easier than Gaelic.

are doing their best but owners are driven to hiding car keys in biscuit tins or Faraday boxes to prevent clever thieves from bouncing their signals and stealing their car. But now – thanks to COVID, fires and freak weather in

SMALL DELIGHTS Removing all the plastic covering from a cucumber in one pull. DOROTHY EDWARDS, LLANDUDNO

Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

Texas and Japan – the world can’t supply microchips fast enough. There’s a global shortage – but we need microchips for everything from washing machines to mobile phones. And cars. Thousands of cars are going nowhere, waiting for vital bits – including keys. If you’ve lost your key, you’re going to have a very long wait for a replacement. Remote-control keys do nothing to improve our driving experience. All that bother and expense for nothing. Let’s save those microchips and use them for something more important. And go back to simple keys. SHARON GRIFFITHS The Oldie August 2022 63

Arts FILM HARRY MOUNT MCENROE (PG) Don’t worry if you aren’t a tennis fan. This terrific documentary about John McEnroe, aka Superbrat, may feature lots of glorious tennis – including his epic Wimbledon finals with Björn Borg in 1980 and 1981. But the film is really about what a troubled soul McEnroe, now 63, is – or was – largely thanks to the King of Competitive Dads, also called John McEnroe. In one revealing clip, his elderly father, battered by a lifetime of drinking, gets angry with the director for calling him John McEnroe Senior. ‘I’m not John McEnroe Senior,’ he barks, with the same 10,000-yard angry-toddler stare as his son. ‘He’s John McEnroe Junior.’ Junior was brought up in middle-class comfort in Douglaston on Long Island, not far from Great Neck, where The Great Gatsby is set. McEnroe Senior, son of Irish immigrants, was a lawyer, having fought his way to prosperity after a spell in the US Air Force. Junior inherited his anger and his perfectionism. Little John McEnroe was incensed when, aged 6, he got only an A minus. He was a clever boy, good at maths and chess – which later helped him mentally to divide the opponent’s court into percentiles and work out the best spot to target his shots. The perfectionism continued on the tennis court at a young age – he got to the semi-finals at Wimbledon in 1977, aged only 18. So did the intense presence of his father, who was McEnroe’s business manager. And so, famously, did the anger. My god, he’s terrifyingly nasty when he’s angry. How you feel for the umpires 64 The Oldie August 2022

Serious: McEnroe at Wimbledon, 1980

as he launches into the ‘You cannot be serious’ tirades. McEnroe is much calmer today but he’s still scary when he’s angry, says his second wife, singer Patty Smyth – who calmed him down after his disastrous marriage to child star Tatum O’Neal, later a heroin addict. Still, the anger made for compulsive viewing. And it was useful for putting off opponents (‘It’s great to be a bit of a prick,’ he says), as long as he wasn’t being docked points, which he often was. Like a lot of angry people, McEnroe could calm down instantly and get back on the rails on court. The rage also helped him secure advertising endorsements. The film intersperses original footage with interviews – there’s no voiceover, as in all the best documentaries. In his own interview, McEnroe cuts a sympathetic, intelligent, funny figure – as he has in the Wimbledon commentary box again in recent weeks. Full of regret for the way he behaved, he is a strange mixture of arrogant (with

some justification) and diffident. ‘I’m the greatest player that’s ever played at this point [in the early 1980s],’ he says, but, at the same time, he felt doomed and ‘did a shitty job of it’. The perfectionism drove him on remorselessly. Drink and drugs detracted from his performance but they acted as a pressure valve. And Competitive Dad was always there. Even after McEnroe sacked him as his business manager – it can’t be easy to sack your dad – Senior was always lurking in his son’s psyche. Until the day he died in 2017, aged 81, McEnroe’s father never apologised to his boy for giving him a hard time – and he was pretty hard on McEnroe’s mother in her dying days, too. What a tough sport tennis is. Borg – still as handsome a Viking god as ever – says what an extremely lonely game it is. Billie Jean King suggests it was McEnroe’s victory over Borg in the 1981 Wimbledon final, after five consecutive Championship titles for the ice-calm Swede, that broke Borg’s spirit and led to his retirement, aged only 26, a year later. McEnroe became friends with Borg and tried to get him back on the circuit. The cliché about tennis is true – you play better with better opponents. Borg refused, saying that McEnroe, three years his junior, would one day know why he quit. The pressure was just too much. In fact, McEnroe was so resilient that he went on and on. He retired in 1992, aged 33, after 77 singles titles and 78 doubles titles – still a record. The film has a slightly annoying thread of having McEnroe walk through New York at night. But it does have one compensation. At one moment, he steps onto a deserted court, alone, and launches into that unique, alarmingly side-on serve – and the years melt away.

GARY SMITH

THEATRE WILLIAM COOK BUGSY MALONE Touring nationwide How old were you when you first saw the original film of Bugsy Malone (1976)? I was 11 when the film came out in 1976 and, for me and millions of children like me, it was love at first sight. All the actors in the movie were my age or thereabouts, and they were having so much fun! Why couldn’t real life be like this? For the benefit of anyone who’s been living in North Korea for the last 45 years, Bugsy Malone is an affectionate parody of American gangster films of the 1930s and 1940s, the films Bugsy’s British writer and director, the late Alan Parker, grew up watching on Saturday mornings in the 1950s. That genre has been parodied countless times, both before the film and since, and most attempts have been eminently forgettable. Parker’s genius was to recast his tongue-in-cheek homage with children instead of adults. As the film’s star, Scott Baio, observed, Bugsy Malone was the ultimate kids’ fantasy: ‘You get to dress up as a gangster, you get to shoot guns that fire whipped cream, you get to drive cars with pedals that look like real cars…’ I wanted to be Scott Baio, I wanted to marry his twelve-year-old co-star, Jodie Foster (I wonder what became of her?) and I wanted a machine gun that fired whipped cream. Sadly, none of these dreams came true. After Bugsy Malone, adulthood is a bitter disappointment, but Alan Parker’s prohibition pastiche hasn’t soured in the slightest. My children loved it, and I’m sure their children will love it, too. Yet the version my kids are most familiar with isn’t Parker’s movie, but the stage show. Bugsy seems like such a natural fit for the theatre that you might assume that Parker originally wrote it for the stage. Yet for many years he was ambivalent about the idea of a theatrical version of his debut movie. God knows why. It has everything a decent stage musical requires: goodies, baddies, a likeable hero and a lovable villain, a femme fatale and countless comic turns. Thankfully, Parker succumbed and wrote a theatrical adaptation, retaining most of his original screenplay, seasoned with salty one-liners – the kind of wisecracks James Cagney and

Fat Sam’s Grand Slam: Bugsy Malone

Humphrey Bogart used to make before they shot the mobsters or snogged the broads. And to top it all, there’s that wonderful score by Paul Williams. Every song plays like a top-ten hit: Fat Sam’s Grand Slam, You Give a Little Love, So You Wanna Be a Boxer… Unlike Parker’s movie, this stage show isn’t entirely performed by children. Although the leading roles are played by kids, the ensemble players are (young) adults. On paper, this sounds bizarre, but on-stage it works a treat: the seasoned professionalism of the chorus drives the show, and the fragile innocence of the leading players gives it tenderness and pathos. As in all professional productions, the children’s roles are shared between a rotating cast of child actors. So there’s not much point my telling you all that much about the particular performances I saw, when you’ll stand an only one-in-three chance of seeing those particular players. Suffice to say that the leading players I saw were all charming, especially Albie Snelson and Desmond Cole as rival mob bosses Fat Sam and Dandy Dan, and I’d be surprised if the actors they’re alternating with aren’t just as good. The fact that the acting is so accomplished, right across the board, is down to director Sean Holmes. This isn’t a rag-bag of individual turns. These actors are all acting for one another. His production rattles along at a terrific pace – at two hours, including the interval, it isn’t a minute too long. Yet

Holmes still finds room for light and shade, and some lovely self-deprecating humour. It never gets too slick or sassy – he lets the personalities of these children shine through. I went to see it with my friend’s teenage daughter, and she loved it. She said she liked the car chase best. My favourite bit was the finale, a riotous curtain call, in which the cast all let their hair down. Is there anything more uplifting than watching children having fun? It reminded me how it felt to see the film that first time, all those years ago. Now where can I buy a splurge gun?

RADIO VALERIE GROVE ‘You have to stay tuned to us or you’ll get interrupted by gardening programmes,’ crowed Matt Chorley on Times Radio. Hours later, there came a tsunami of rolling news. At such moments, the best escape is in timeless culture. I pounced, on a single day that weekend, on two major radio productions of Reithian promise. On Radio 3, He Do The Waste Land in Different Voices, a dramatic reading of Eliot’s The Waste Land in its centenary year. On Radio 4, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. In 1922, the wretchedly unhappilymarried Eliot – ‘My nerves are bad tonight’ was the voice of his then wife Vivienne – first called his poem He Do the Police in Different Voices: a line from Our Mutual Friend. The varied The Oldie August 2022 65

voices and languages – from Dante, Sanskrit texts, the Bible and Cockney Lil – gave ample scope to a wonderful cast who included Maggie Steed, David Haig and Adrian Edmondson. The production, by David Thomas and Caroline Raphael, was in binaural sound – ‘best listened to on earphones’ – which made even familiar lines such as ‘April is the cruellest month’ especially visionary and bleak. Mansfield Park is a great favourite of mine. But it was odd to hear, in the opening scene of Gaynor MacFarlane’s production, the languid and indolent Lady Bertram – who spent her days sitting ‘nicely dressed on a sofa, doing some long piece of needlework of little use and no beauty’ – chatting like a chirpy schoolgirl, as she urged her husband to take in their poor niece Fanny, one of her feckless sister’s nine children in Portsmouth. And the odious Mrs Norris, pretending magnanimity; the Crawford siblings; the Bertram girls patronising their little cousin: such excellent characterisations. I scurried off to re-read Austen’s own words on the page. I found myself assailed by memories. Wasn’t there a programme on The Waste Land, presented by Melvyn Bragg, based on one of the late Josephine Hart’s poetry evenings? Hart’s favourite actors – Michael Gough, Edward Fox, Eileen Atkins – gave inimitable readings of Eliot. Could I find that 1987 recording? I could. On YouTube, a magnificent two hours’ worth. Eliot’s biographer Peter Ackroyd and the poet Craig Raine, then boyish and lively, spoke about Eliot with animated spirit. And no actors will ever match the diction of Fox, or Gough. Eileen Atkins looks beautiful and her vocal interpretation is unsurpassable. As for Mansfield Park, my favourite version was the 1999 film starring Lindsay Duncan as a narcoleptic Lady B. Harold Pinter was unmatchable as Sir Thomas, striding forth in his top boots, gazing leerily at Fanny, later coldly bullying her about accepting the cad Henry’s proposal. Patricia Rozema’s script was unusually faithful to the book. A deeply satisfying film – and that’s on YouTube, too. Hooray! Sometimes the best service a radio programme provides is to propel you to seek further, even if on another ‘device’. Stop press: the lovely June Spencer, Peggy of The Archers, last survivor of the original 1950 cast and a star of many Oldie of the Year lunches, who celebrated her 103rd birthday last month – is 66 The Oldie August 2022

bowing out from Ambridge. In her youth, she wrote comic monologues, and she once said she wished Peggy had a sense of humour. She also said, ‘I just put on the character like an old coat.’

TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON Where were you on the evening of 22nd January 2011? Let me jog your memory: a terrified girl running through a dark wood, a politician’s car at the bottom of a lake, a female detective in a chunky cream-and-black Faroese sweater. You were watching episode one of The Killing, of course! The Killing (Forbrydelsen in the original Danish) brought a welcome darkness into our lives. If Inspector Morse was the equivalent of a pint of warm beer, this was caviar from a live fish. With its precise, pared-down dialogue, The Killing added depth and dimension to the genre that, in England at least, had become a form of nostalgia television, composed of cottages and country pubs. Instead of the gentle melancholy of Bergerac or Midsomer Murders, we had searing grief. Blue skies were replaced by rain-clouds. Stock types were replaced by complex characters such as Detective Inspector Sarah Lund (Sofie Gråbøl), whose sweater became that season’s must-have item. Even politics played a part in Scandi noir. But it wasn’t only the dull, naturalistic palette that we loved in The Killing, the show’s slow, heavy tread, or the misery etched into the

faces of the dead girl’s parents. It was the nobility of the language. Danish, which originates from Old Norse – some of whose words, such as knifr (knife) and deyra (die), have filtered into English – brings with it the cool air of Viking voyages and angry gods. Anything said in Danish sounds ancient and true; compare the formidable weight of the word Forbrydelsen to its feeble English translation. The Americans, missing the aural magic of the show, opted to remake the entire series rather than screen it with subtitles. I don’t know anyone who bothered to watch the US version of The Killing. After The Killing came The Bridge, and another iconic female detective. Saga Norén (played by Sofia Helin) wore leather trousers, drove a Porsche, and – being autistic – cut social interaction down to the basics. When a stranger asked if he could buy her a drink, she replied that she wanted only sex. She might look like the blonde girl in ABBA, but Saga behaves just like a man! Season one began with the top half of a Swedish politician and the bottom half of a Danish prostitute being discovered in the middle of the Øresund Bridge, which connects Copenhagen with Malmö. No one cared that much who cut the bodies in two; the allure was Saga’s loneliness. Scandi noir began with Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander novels. They were turned into 13 films starring Krister Henriksson before being adapted for the English-language audience by Kenneth Branagh. We now also have Young Wallander, and fans of Scandi noir can additionally binge on Trapped (set in

Detective Inspector Sarah Lund (Sofie Gråbøl) plus iconic sweater, The Killing

Ed McLachlan

Iceland) and Bordertown (set in Finland). Meanwhile Scandi solitude has influenced our own Shetland and the sharper, harder styles of The Missing and Broadchurch. Which brings me to Trom, the new BBC4 drama based on Jógvan Isaksen’s novels. Trom, which we might call eco noir, is set in the Faroe Islands, where the women have wild eyes and rough fringes and everyone wears versions of Sarah Lund’s chunky jumper. Sonja (Helena Heðinsdóttir), an animal-rights activist, knows something is wrong when she finds a hunk of bleeding whale meat in her daughter’s bed. She then goes missing after leaving a video message on the phone of investigative journalist Hannis Martinsson (Ulrich Thomsen), informing him that he is in fact her father. By the time Hannis has landed on the islands, Sonja’s body has washed up during a whale hunt. The detective, Karla Mohr (played by Maria Würgler Rich), is long-legged and introverted but a poor substitute for either Sarah or Saga, whose wonderful faces are hard to forget. The trouble with Trom is that, while it looks like Scandi noir, walks like Scandi noir and talks like

Scandi noir, it isn’t Scandi noir. Instead of depth and sadness, there is the impersonation of depth and sadness. The characters are uninteresting because they have no real character. Or, rather, they have the same character: dour, humourless, preoccupied. The point about Scandi noir is that no one would ever want to go to the godforsaken places it is filmed in, but the landscape in Trom is quite something. Instead of following the subtitles, I found myself googling guesthouses in the capital city of Tórshavn – which is, I discovered to my joy, named after the hammer-wielding Norse god of thunder.

MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE L’ORFEO AND MACBETH This year provided as fine a start to the summer season of privately funded ‘country-house’ opera as any I can remember. Glyndebourne’s artistically adventurous and theatrically thrilling revival of Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers launched the season. Then Garsington’s powerful new production of Monteverdi’s

L’Orfeo was followed by a viscerally splendid new staging of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Grange in Hampshire. It was after completing his own prose draft for an operatic treatment of Macbeth that the 32-year-old Verdi wrote to his librettist, ‘The tragedy is one of the greatest creations of man; if we can’t make something great, let us at least try to do something out of the ordinary.’ Though I’ve lived with Verdi’s opera for nigh on half a century, I’d forgotten one of its greatest moments: the chorus of exiles at the start of the final act, where we see bereaved women and fatherless children making their exhausted way from the tyrant’s beleaguered Scotland. Recomposed in 1865, it’s a chorus whose music is as profound as anything we find in Verdi’s then-soon-to-bewritten Requiem. Perhaps I’d never been fully alerted to the depth of human emotion with which Verdi invested the revised chorus. With the war in Ukraine dragging on and people becoming ever more indifferent to the images television news routinely generates, this scene plunged the Grange audience into what I can best describe as an appalled silence. Such is the durable power of great art! Shakespeare’s Macbeth was first seen in London towards the end of 1606. Months later, an event took place in the Mantuan court of Duke Francesco Gonzaga that set in train the whole business of what we nowadays call ‘opera’. Sixteenth-century Italian courts were awash with ballet, madrigal comedies and pastoral plays, backlit by as variable an array of new-fangled instruments and instrumental effects as any dreamed up by Berlioz or the Rock Gods of the 1970s. All that was needed was someone to light the blue touchpaper. That came on the evening of 24th February 1607, with Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, a theatrical re-enactment of the tale of Orpheus and what Milton called ‘his half-regained Eurydice’. ‘Tomorrow evening, His Highness is to have performed a piece that will be unique, since all the performers speak musically,’ wrote a courtier. It was this ‘speaking musically’ – music’s answer to the contemporary revolution that was Elizabethan blank verse – that launched opera. The finest staging of L’Orfeo I’d yet seen – the nation, too, since in those days BBC2 filmed it – was by Kent Opera in 1976. Directed by Jonathan Miller against a backdrop of Poussin-inspired designs by Bernard Culshaw, and The Oldie August 2022 67

SIMON ANNAND

Macbeth (Gezim Myshketa), Lady Macbeth (Judith Howarth); Banquo (Jonathan Lemalu)

conducted by Roger Norrington, it was a realisation of ineffable beauty and power. Aside from some undisciplined choral work in the pastoral first act, Garsington’s new production was every bit as fine, albeit grander and in a darker register. L’Orfeo, along with the tragedies of the ancient Greeks, was what Wagner would later call ‘the complete artwork’. This production, directed with unostentatious skill by John Caird, was as complete an experience as anything you might hope to encounter on that famous hill in Bayreuth. Indeed, the set designs and powerfully atmospheric lighting created by Robert Jones and Paul Pyant were of a quality any director of a Bayreuth Ring might be pleased to own. Ed Lyon was a superb Orfeo, speaking musically with a perfect blend of virtuosity and vocal heft. The greatest test comes in Act 5 as, bereaved, bereft and angry, Orfeo is pitched back into the Arcadian fields. It’s here, as he grapples with remembrance of times past, that we encounter one of opera’s most powerful and broad-spanned vocal meditations. ‘Follow that!’ Monteverdi seems to say to opera composers yet unborn. Most versions of the story have the bereaved Orpheus denouncing womanhood, finding solace in the arms of ephebic boys, and being torn to death by enraged Maenads. This is the version Monteverdi set, until Duke Gonzaga revived the entertainment for a womenonly evening at the Mantuan court and requested a Maenad-free dénouement. It’s this that we have today: Orfeo’s erstwhile mentor, the god Apollo, now descending from the skies to whisk heavenward the sullen lad. 68 The Oldie August 2022

There’s no fly tower in Garsington’s rural theatre, any more than there was in the Mantuan court. No matter. Our own maestro di cappella, Laurence Cummings, was on hand to don Apollo’s crown and, in a dryish tenor, invite Orfeo to join the immortals. Not that the Maenads are entirely forgotten. There’s a touch of Moorish wildness in Monteverdi’s concluding dance, suggesting that where unruly passions flare, danger will always lurk.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON EVERGREEN BUSH Vita is brevis and ars is longa, but the careers of pop stars today are even longer – which means I have a heaven-sent opportunity to set the record straight over something I wrote back in 2014. This was a review of Kate Bush at the Hammersmith Apollo – a ‘residency’ most fans would have killed for and her first live show since 1979. She has not performed since. What’s so silly is that I too am a Kate Bush fan. Who isn’t? Especially now – and we will come to that. Wutheringuthering-uthering Heights! Babooshka! King of the Mountain! Not wanting to re-ignite the firestorm, all I will say is I’m sorry I so utterly missed the point of her Before the Dawn live series, her artistic importance and her performance. I stupidly said in my piece that she was no longer the lithe teenager in a leotard who burst forth on an unsuspecting world in 1978 and changed pop music for ever. Thank goodness nobody noticed.

Everyone is again apprised of her rare genius as she is enjoying (‘The world’s gone mad,’ she said to the BBC, on her old-school landline) a recordskittling renaissance. Among her achievements are: 1. Longest gap between number ones. Wuthering Heights went to number one in 1978 and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) has hit number one 44 years later (it’s also running up the charts in the US). The previous titleholder for longest-ever gap was Tom Jones, for whom a mere 42 years separated Green, Green Grass of Home and (Barry) Islands in the Stream. 2. Longest time taken for a single to reach number one from time of release – ie from 1985 to 2022. 3. Oldest female artist to top the charts: Kate is 64; the previous-title holder was Cher at a mere 52. And for why this Summer of Kate Bush Love? There’s a scene in Stranger Things (Netflix) of a girl called Max being saved by someone putting a cassette of Hounds of Love into a Walkman and playing her favourite song, Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), and the rest is now pop history. Kids all over the planet freaked out, went nuts for it and asked their boomer parents, ‘Have you heard of Kate Bush?’ The scene has had well over half a billion views on TikTok. Kate Bush has even emerged for pretty much the first time since my ill-judged review to marvel at her own resurrection. ‘I never listen to my old stuff,’ she told the BBC. Everyone has fallen in love with her all over again, now she’s 64; from sea to shining sea. The younger generation has welcomed her with purer souls than mine, even though she said she was more into kitchen gardening than into kitchen disco. What a time to be alive!

Kate Bush on her Before the Dawn tour, 2014

EXHIBITIONS

NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND / ROYAL SCOTTISH ACADEMY

HUON MALLALIEU A TASTE FOR IMPRESSIONISM Royal Scottish Academy to 30th November LEON MORROCCO Royal Scottish Academy to 28th August The long, weary, saga of Edinburgh’s tram system has been trumped. At the Scottish National Gallery, construction work finally began in 2018, the year it was supposed to have been completed. The latest prediction is that the building on The Mound will reopen in a year’s time. As a result, exhibitions have had to find other locations, of which the most convenient is the Royal Scottish Academy immediately next door. The Upper Galleries are housing the National Galleries’ principal summer offering, the Impressionist show, while the Lower celebrate one of the Academy’s own luminaries. The Impressionists caught the attention of Scottish collectors while the English were still scoffing. In fact, it is probably more accurate to say Glaswegian collectors, and to credit one man in particular for opening their eyes. The dealer Alexander Reid (1854-1928) ‘was without question the most innovative British dealer of this period’. From 1886 to 1889, he worked in Paris and shared an apartment with the Van Gogh brothers. Vincent’s portrait of him shows them to have been remarkably alike. Reid opened his Glasgow gallery, La Société des Beaux Arts, in 1889 – the name declared the stock – and three years later bought his first Impressionists. He cultivated a taste for them among the city’s new rich, many of whom were shipowners or shipbuilders such as Sir William Burrell. This was art that appealed to husbands and wives alike, and often the wives took the lead; Fantin-Latour’s flower pieces were favourites. Notable among these couples were Elizabeth and Robert Workman and, a little later, Rosalind and Alexander Maitland, whose magnificent collection came to the National Gallery of Scotland in the 1960s. All the big names of ‘long Impressionism’ are here, from Millet to Matisse. A Taste for Impressionism has a salutary sting: as the market thrived, fakes flourished. The show includes a few of these, which are unidentified to test visitors’ powers of discernment. Even though he has not lived in Scotland since 1979, the colourful

Above: Olive Trees, Vincent van Gogh, 1889. Left: Icare, Henri Matisse, 1947. Below left: Vision after the Sermon, Paul Gauguin, 1888. Below and bottom: Green Hill behind Gourdon and SelfPortrait with Lobster, Leon Morrocco

landscape-painter Leon Morrocco, Edinburgh-born son of Alberto, is one of the RSA’s longest-standing members, having been elected an Associate in 1971 at 29. To mark his 80th birthday, he is rightly being celebrated as one of the most important Scottish painters of his generation. The Oldie August 2022 69

Pursuits GARDENING DAVID WHEELER LATE-FLOWERING LUST The asters are among us again. Hooray! So too the hydrangeas. Hurrah! Also the dahlias. As fashionable as they are, I don’t grow these any more. I leave them instead to their many addicts who exhibit them at village shows and fêtes all over the country at this time of year. I had an uncle who grew prize-winning whoppers between rows of his equally elephantine-headed chrysanthemums. Surprisingly, I never caught the dahlia bug – surprisingly because, as my gardening chums will vouch, my floral tastes are, to say the least, broad. I did grow a few dahlias as a teenager. I was fond and indeed proud then of their overblown blooms and gaudy palette. Subtler varieties exist, of course, but somehow… As for hydrangeas, the 200 or so different varieties in my newly installed collection are seemingly set well to provide a pageant I won’t be able to ignore this time next year. Asters, supreme prairie flowers, give generously to the garden’s splendour over several late months. In blues, pinks and almost every mauvy/purple shade between, as well as white, these covetable Michaelmas daisies either come diminutively or stalk our beds and borders like gentle giants. The place to see (and buy) them is in the lee of the Malvern Hills, at Old Court Nurseries at Colwall. The more than 400 cultivars making up the Plant Heritage National Collection illuminate a series of display beds set among many other August/September-flowering trophies. After COVID’s recent travel restrictions, I’ll be glad to tread Old Court’s sinuous paths once more. Most gardeners rank gentians as

another diminutive genus – and see them as a springtime delight rather than denizens of late summer. But consider the willow gentian, Gentiana asclepiadea, an easily cultivated lateseason perennial up to three feet tall, with bowed fronds bearing a long succession of true gentian-blue trumpets. In a previous garden, I wove this beauty liberally through a tribe of peonies (their springtime flowers long since spent, they were adorned in August by seed pods like jesters’ hats) just as their foliage began to adopt glorious autumnal hues of dusky crimson. The gentian’s contrasting blue was electrifying – better than expected. Other stately inhabitants of August flower-beds can be found among the lobelias. No, not the bedding-out or hanging-basket kinds, but the leggy, perennial Lobelia cardinalis, whose full-on colour of guardsman red (fabulously strong in the variety ‘Queen Victoria’, intensified by mysteriously dark stems and leaves) places them among the season’s rightful indispensables. Another equally tall and regal lobelia, L siphilitica (early European settlers in its native US deemed it a cure for syphilis), bestows a typically good blue or desirable shot of violet. My much-thumbed copy of Marina Christopher’s Late Summer Flowers (2006) reminds me of other lobelias I still want to try – notably ‘Hadspen Purple’, which she describes as having

Lobelia cardinalis ‘Queen Victoria’

‘sumptuous, plum-purple flowers on tall [4ft] sturdy stems’. Mmm. For oldies fearful of plants that might be too tall and, like us, in need of support, there are numerous lowgrowers that just as ably boost the season’s incandescence. Try Liriope muscari, the shorter asters, tireless perennial geraniums or the highly scented little Heliotrope arborescens. Horticulturally, I can think of nothing better for delaying winter’s looming blitz than the planting of luminous latesummer flowers – or the viewing of someone else’s galaxy. I’ll be back among more of these 11th-hour lovelies next month, further celebrating their boundless range and diversity, their general ease of cultivation and the rich dividends paid by their annual reappearance. David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal

KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD SAMPHIRE It’s the samphire season. This plant, which grows in salt-water marshes and mudflats around the coasts of Britain, is best harvested between late June and August. I have seen it on sale in April, imported from Israel, but to me this is as unacceptable as eating asparagus from Peru in winter. Samphire has been called poor man’s asparagus, presumably because it costs nothing to forage on the shore between the tides and foraging is often a muddy business. This is marsh samphire, which has also been called glasswort as, after it had been burnt, its ash was used in medieval glassmaking. Rock samphire is said to have a medicinal taste, and is anyway too dangerous for most oldies to gather from steep cliffs. The Oldie August 2022 71

The tops of the samphire plants should be cut, leaving the woody stalks and the roots to grow again next year. Those of us of a certain age, however, who would rather not be stuck in the mud in a lonely marsh, can grow samphire from seed in our gardens. The seeds are best sown in a greenhouse in spring and planted out in a light, sandy soil where the ground has been well watered. Alternatively, keep the samphire in trays in the greenhouse. It grows to a height of only a few inches; so it occupies little space. Sarah Raven advises growing samphire in a large pot. The important thing is to keep the plants moist, with a saline solution of one teaspoon of sea salt to a pint of water – don’t use table salt, which will probably kill the plants. With luck, samphire grown outside will reseed itself for the following year. As the germination of samphire seeds can be irregular, it may be worth considering a similar vegetable, monk’s beard, in Italian barba di frate or agretti, which will grow more reliably inland. Like those of samphire, its ashes were once used in glassmaking, particularly on the Venetian island of Murano. The young, needle-shaped leaves may be eaten raw or steamed, and now have the imprimatur of Jamie Oliver, who grows agretti successfully in his garden in Essex.

COOKERY ELISABETH LUARD HOME PICNICS

ELISABETH LUARD

High summer is no time to be slaving over a hot stove when a person could be sipping something refreshing under an olive tree by the sea. And if not, well, head for the end of the garden or a patch of greenery in the park. Pack a picnic. Nothing fancy. Certainly nothing that involves a can-opener or is likely to need a fire-extinguisher in a national park. The close-to-home picnic needs a touch of the exotic – a chilled gazpacho, perhaps, as a reminder of sunny days beside the Mediterranean. And do add something comforting, recalled from childhood – a baked potato, say, mashed with salad cream eaten from the hand on a Norfolk beach in the rain. Happy days! Ajo blanco The cooks of Granada, last redoubt of the Moors in Andalusia, kept the imprint of the caliphate in the kitchen long after the re-conquest. Among Middle Eastern habits is an almond-milk gazpacho that never succumbed to the New World’s tomato. But be warned – it has a kick like 72 The Oldie August 2022

1 whole egg plus 1 yolk 300ml single cream 300ml milk 150ml white malt or cider vinegar

a mule’s. So choose mild summer garlic with no sign of sprouting. Makes about a litre. 1-2 thick slices dried-out white bread, crusts removed 100g blanched almonds, roughly chopped 2-3 fat, juicy garlic cloves, skinned and crushed 1 tbsp olive oil 1 tbsp white wine vinegar 1 tsp sugar ½ tsp salt To serve Small white grapes, peeled and pipped Drop the bread (roughly torn) into the blender with the rest of ingredients, add half a litre of cold water, and process till smooth. Dilute to a milky consistency with more cold water (about another half-litre), taste and adjust the seasoning. For extra smoothness, push through a sieve – or not, as you please. Transfer to a jug and chill in the fridge. Pour over a single ice cube into short tumblers and drop in a couple of peeled grapes. Serve as a tapa with toasted, salted almonds and juicy green olives, or as a palate-sharpener with a serious main-course salad (Granada grows artichokes and all manner of excellent vegetables). English salad cream Retro cooking is back – and a good thing, too. What the best-dressed salads are wearing this summer is, in essence, an unsweetened egg custard sharpened with vinegar, nine variations of which (more mustard, less vinegar?) were contributed to a WI booklet in 1948, and nary a mention of mayo. Makes about a pint. 1 tsp plain flour ½ tsp mustard powder 1 tsp salt ½ tsp freshly milled white pepper 1 tbsp seed oil

Work the flour, mustard, salt and pepper to a paste with a little oil, then beat in the rest of the ingredients (or process all in a blender till smooth). Tip the mixture into a bowl placed over a pan of simmering water and whisk over the heat, as if for a custard, until the mixture thickens enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon. Remove from the heat, taste and correct the seasoning (maybe add a little sugar?), allow to cool, bottle and keep in the fridge till needed. Delicious as a dip for hard-boiled eggs; or in a prawn cocktail; or with a cold roast chicken; or to dress a salad of new potatoes and apple, or of beetroot and celery; or … I’m sure you get the picture.

RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE LAST SUPPER IN EDINBURGH My son, Leo, has just graduated from Edinburgh University. And so comes to an end four years of spoiling dinners in those of the city’s restaurants which lie way beyond the borders of a student budget but which Leo decided must lie well within his parents’. That great fallacy of childhood: ‘My parents can afford anything I want them to.’ Well, the redistribution of our alleged wealth is over, and we can now look forward to him treating us. In 30 years. To a pizza. So, given I have been denuded by Edinburgh’s finest eateries, you readers may as well get my money’s worth of knowledge in time for this year’s festival. In its determination to be a gastronomic capital, Edinburgh loves ‘fancy’. This can result in punters taking out an additional mortgage, after being patronised by a monotonous 19-year-old fresh out of the Miss Jean Brodie School of Hospitality and Condescension, who will sullenly explain a tasting menu as if reciting a death sentence. Major offenders are Kitchin (£175 for six courses, including a ‘pre-starter’ and ‘pre-dessert’), 21212 (five courses for £90) and Timberyard (£69 for four courses). Fhior is a relative bargain at £70 for seven courses, but order a pizza on the way home. In stark denial of their Escoffier-inspired national treasure, the deep-fried Mars bar, their menus boast of ‘Scotland’s rich culinary landscape’. Expect an abundance of alternative

venison and salmon dishes and a surfeit of berries and wild flowers, whose indigestibility saw off the last remaining reindeer a few millennia back. There are still plenty of delights, which should be booked well ahead of the festival’s start date of 5th August. The Gardener’s Cottage and its nearby sister restaurant, the Lookout on Calton Hill, take some beating, especially given the latter’s peerless views of the city and Firth of Forth. For dinner, I would head to Noto, a Michelin Bib Gourmand, with its evolving menu of shared plates imaginative enough to rival anywhere else in these blessed isles. If you want American-tourist Edinburgh, head up to the Witchery by the castle, the execution place of 500-600 male and female witches in the reign of James I and VI. The 17th-century Witchery dining room is too dark and oak-panelled for lunch. So go behind to the terrace of the Secret Garden for lunch (two courses for £27.50). The Ivy on St Andrew Square is all but unique in Edinburgh in having outdoor tables. Perfect for lunch and for their espresso martinis. Fishers on the quay at Leith is very jolly for an outside seafood lunch. And Mother India’s Café has been serving up inexpensive home-cooked dishes across Edinburgh and Glasgow for over 30 years. Café St Honoré, tucked in the New Town, offers hearty two-course dinners for £26.50 and drinkable house wine from the Languedoc for just £23.50 a bottle. But if you want a real bargain, try Jules Bistro, which offers a threecourse lunch menu for £11.90 with house wines at £16.90. Avoid the French-onion soup and opt for the goat-cheese salad and coq au vin. It’s a buzzing joint, the reincarnation of Bistro Vino from the 1970s. It was my son’s and his girlfriend’s favourite place and the scene of their last dinner ever as students.

DRINK BILL KNOTT DOWN MEXICO WAY I tried my hand at being a jimador once. It was a swelteringly hot day, and I was in a field somewhere outside Guadalajara, in Mexico’s Jalisco province, surrounded by thousands of huge, spiky, blue agave plants shimmering hazily in the heat. Piece of cake, I thought, naively, as a farmer wielded his coa – a kind of long, wooden-handled hoe with a sharp,

curved blade – and expertly sheared the spikes from the agave’s massive, bulbous heart. Ten minutes later, I was drenched in sweat, panting for breath, and my career as a jimador was over. I made it as far as the nearest bar and revived myself with a stiff margarita: a cocktail that, of course, would not exist without the sterling efforts of the jimadors. The sugar-rich agave hearts – piñas, named for their resemblance to pineapples – are steamed, crushed, fermented, distilled and bottled as tequila, sometimes after being aged in wood. The piña at which I hacked so helplessly was destined for the excellent Herradura Plata (thewhiskyexchange. com, £40.95). Much less vital to the production of great tequila is the endorsement of a celebrity, but that has not stopped them. In recent years, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Rita Ora and AC/DC have all launched new tequila brands. Five years ago, George Clooney sold his Casamigos brand to drinks giant Diageo for a reported $1 billion – so there is clearly an appetite for the stuff. Mijenta, a mercifully celeb-free brand from the highlands of Jalisco, produces the classic range of blanco (white and unaged), reposado (aged for up to six months in wood) and añejo (aged for at least 18 months). Añejos are made to be sipped, rather than mixed (and certainly not slammed), while blancos and reposados both make excellent cocktails. So I have experimented with a few, using cocktail guru Simon Difford’s excellent diffordsguide.com as my vade mecum. I am a convert to Difford’s margarita on the rocks, served in an old-fashioned glass: the classic blend of two parts tequila, one part triple sec and one part lime juice with a pinch of salt and a touch of extra sweetness from a dash of agave syrup. Mijenta’s tequilas (available from thewhiskyexchange.com, from £50/70cl) are more fruity and floral than vegetal and earthy, and the syrup adds a welcome note of the plant itself. Shake over ice and strain into glasses filled with fresh ice. Agave syrup crops up again in his version of a paloma: four parts tequila, two parts fresh pink grapefruit juice, one part lime juice and a dash of agave syrup, shaken over ice, then strained into an ice-filled highball glass, topped up with a grapefruit soda and given a quick stir. Fruity and refreshing, with a pleasant kick, it is my summer cocktail of choice. I tip my sombrero to the jimadors, but I know which end of tequila’s life cycle I prefer.

Wine This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a keenly-priced white from one of Spain’s best cooperatives; a summery fizz from a similarly esteemed co-operative in the Loire; and a classic claret from the Graves that would partner a slab of rare roast beef admirably. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine. Sense Cap Blanc, Celler de Capçanes, Montsant 2020, offer price £8.99, case price £107.88 Delightful, mediumbodied white, gently aromatic with a pleasing grip on the palate. Great value. Saumur Brut ‘La Grande Marque’, Cave de Saumur NV, offer price £11.50, case price £138.00 Sprightly, beautifully balanced, classicmethod fizz made from Chenin Blanc: a bottle belongs in every fridge. Château Trébiac, Graves 2018, offer price £13.50, case price £162.00 Fruity, elegantly structured, unoaked claret: 70 per cent Merlot, 30 per cent Cabernet Sauvignon, and drinking very well now.

Mixed case price £135.96 – a saving of £26.91 (including free delivery) HOW TO ORDER

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Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 12th September 2022.

The Oldie August 2022 73

SPORT JIM WHITE DIRTY SPORTSWASHING There are few better recent neologisms than sportswashing. We will be hearing a lot more of the term as this football season gets underway – because, since Mike Ashley sold them last year, Newcastle United are owned by the Saudi government. Or rather by a thinly disguised adjunct of the Saudi government, hastily put together to circumvent the Premier League’s ownership rules and regulations which are supposed to prevent foreign regimes from owning our football clubs. Tough rules, clearly. Turbocharged by an injection of Saudi wealth, Newcastle are expected to become an increasingly competitive outfit, challenging for the top prizes. Money, after all, is what matters in our national game. The teams with the most folding stuff available are the ones that tend to come out on top. Why have the Saudis done it? Why have a bunch of desert-dwellers more inclined to horse-racing and hawkery taken an interest in a declining symbol of English north-eastern working man’s pride? Because they know full well that every challenge the new turbocharged club makes for trophies, and every victory they achieve will provide a giant twin tub to launder the reputation of one of the world’s least attractive dictatorships. Each goal will buff up the international standing of a mediaeval theocracy which cheerfully feeds its critics through bone-shredding machines. As they back a bunch of England-based footballers charmingly decked out in shirts designed to resemble barcodes, it will make them appear benevolent investors, helping to revive a much-loved sleeping giant of a civic institution. Less murderous religious weirdos; more sporting romantics. And it isn’t just the football they are seeking to exploit in the urge to make themselves palatable to the world market. They have invested gazillions in Formula One, building a state-of-the-art track near Riyadh, partnering with the British F1 team McLaren, looking eventually to manufacture and race their own marque. They are at it in golf, throwing money at leading players to encourage them to desert the existing tours and play for their new, cash-bloated tournaments. Boxing, too, is happy to trouser their dosh. Our own Anthony Joshua is one of many top pugilists holding their noses and signing up to lucrative title fights staged in the kingdom. 74 The Oldie August 2022

Not all of this is driven by a wish to be liked. Some of it is to do with diversifying a carbon-dependent economy away from the oil that made the country the richest in the world. Sport, with its attendant broadcasting wealth, is seen as a new way forward. But even as they modernise their fiscal matters, they understand the peripheral benefits. They have watched how their fellow autocrats next door in Abu Dhabi have benefited from their association with Manchester City; how another neighbour, Qatar, is to be the centre of the sporting universe in November when it stages the World Cup. And they want a bit of that. They have learned from the bunch over the garden fence that nobody in sport is averse to the sort of financial assistance they can provide. Morals are soon dispensed with when dosh is involved. ‘We’re not political,’ the participants can claim when subjected to press enquiry. And the fans can engage in industrial scale whataboutery to sidestep scrutiny. In the modern sporting world, money talks. And the least attractive people talk the loudest.

MOTORING ALAN JUDD BRITISH CARS RUNNING ON EMPTY ‘Unable to sleep the other night for worrying about badgers…’ Thus the inimitable Auberon Waugh once began an article. I can’t recall his subject but it doesn’t matter because, hidden beneath his irony, lies one of the stratagems for life: try not to worry about things you can’t influence. The future of our planet, for example – apparently the sun will one day implode and fry us, no matter what wonders we work on global warming. So far I’m managing not to worry too much. But I can’t help worrying about the future of Britain’s car industry. Superficially, the figures aren’t bad. Last year, there were 156,400 people making cars and 979,300 working across the industry. We made 859,000 cars (80 per cent for export), 72,913 commercial vehicles and 1.6 million engines. Now Bloomberg reports that not only are we no longer even in the top 15 motor manufacturing nations (we once were second) but we’re in danger of slipping out of sight and becoming a footnote in motoring history. The reason is the lack of batterymanufacturing capacity. The dash for electric vehicles means we need ever more batteries. Britain has invested hundreds of millions in battery

technology (the ubiquitous lithium-ion battery was designed at Oxford) but, compared with others, we’ve done little about actually making the things. We also suffer from a shortage of local raw materials and, thanks to government policy, higher energy costs than others. Although our one significant battery manufacturer, Envision Group, is supplying Nissan in Sunderland and intends to expand, and although Britishvolt plans a Northumberland factory with capacity for 300,000 battery packs a year, it has been estimated that we need to increase our battery production 45-fold simply to cater for the current size of our motor industry. The EU, meanwhile, is planning to invest more than £5 billion in public funds to support battery-producers. Carmakers want them near their factories because that saves significant costs. If major manufacturers, such as Jaguar Land Rover, are to continue to be UKbased, and if we want to attract others, we must at least equal the incentives offered by the competition. In the words of Andy Palmer, former CEO of Aston Martin, ‘It’s about to be too late to preserve the UK role as a major automotive producer.’ That’s not all. We seem unable – or unwilling? – to take full advantage of what our world-class research capabilities produce. Oxford’s lithiumion battery was bought up and developed by the Japanese, Envision Group is Chinese and now Yasa has been bought lock, stock and barrel by Mercedes. Yasa? No, I hadn’t, either, but we should have. It stands for Yokeless and Segmented Armature and is a radically different way of designing electric motors, making them much lighter and more efficient. It is an industry game-changer and might lead to motors small and powerful enough to be built into a car’s wheels. Developed as part of his PhD thesis by former Oxford student Tim Woolmer, it attracted early interest from Jaguar Land Rover for the hybrid C-X75 supercar they lamentably failed to develop. Great interest from supercarmanufacturers followed, but Mercedes has now trumped them all and the new technology will be developed and monetised (as they like to put it) beyond these shores. It looks like the lithiumion-battery story all over again. We invent but we don’t nurture. Unless we think long-term and put money into production, all our clever babes will be brought up (for which read ‘bought up’) elsewhere. But merely worrying about it does nothing. May as well worry about the badgers.

Matthew Webster: Digital Life

Bring your computer back to life To whom do you turn when your computer starts behaving oddly, or not at all? It’s a regular question from readers, and there’s no easy answer. You might turn to Google; search for ‘laptop-repairer in my area’ and you’ll see many options. No doubt some of them are skilful and worthy of their hire, but I bet a few of them are useless at best, and scoundrels at worst. But how do you separate the sheep from the goats? Let’s take a step back. First, and always, press the ‘Restart’ button and allow the machine to switch itself off and on again. This can solve a multitude of problems; there’s a lot going on inside

Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk

Quordle quordle.com Bored with Wordle? Try this version; nine guesses to get four words. Solar System scope solarsystemscope.com Excellent online model of the solar system, night sky and outer space in real time, with accurate positions of planets. I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

your laptop and it’s not hard for it to get into a muddle. Use the ‘Restart’ and not the ‘Shut down’ option. Don’t ask me why, but a ‘Restart’ really does clear the decks, whereas a ‘Shut down’ leaves some decks uncleared. That doesn’t always solve everything, and you might need professional help. Here we enter deep waters. Whomever you choose, they must be trustworthy; you will give them access to all that is on your computer. On top of that, they may well have to wipe it clean – especially if they need to replace something critical – and you might lose everything. But, of course, you have backed everything up – so that won’t matter. You have, haven’t you? How do you assess a potential repairer? It’s no good asking to see qualifications; they probably haven’t got any. It’s not their fault; there just aren’t any worth getting. I spoke to Lee Grant, who runs Inspiration Computers in Huddersfield. He undertakes no end of repairs and recently won the Which? Trusted Trader of the Year award. He shares my view that it’s a jungle out there. He believes that much of the problem is that laptops, phones and so on have for ages been built in a way that makes repair impossible. This increases the amount of tech that is thrown away (very ungreen), and also discourages people from even trying to set up repair shops. That is changing, slowly, because of both government and consumer pressure, and we are seeing some growth in the repair market, but progress is slow.

In the meantime, what should we do? As Lee Grant told me, it all depends on how much botheration you’re prepared to put up with and how much you spend. The gold standard is to do what many businesses (and I) do: buy new equipment with an extended warranty from one of the big boys (I use Dell), and then buy new kit when the warranty expires. It’s an expensive option but I know that when something fails, a technician will be here within hours and will mend or replace it at no extra cost to me. But that’s no good if you have an elderly iPad your son passed down to you. You need a friendly, local repairer; elderly computers (five years or more is elderly, sadly) are like old cars. The local main dealer will sneer at them, but they are meat and drink to the mechanic in the railway arch. So my advice is this. As with any professional, the best way to find one is by personal recommendation – so ask around. Also, and even if you are given a personal recommendation, have a look at the Which? Trusted Traders scheme (trustedtraders.which.co.uk) and see whether they recommend anyone locally. Finally, as I mentioned before, please, one way or another, back up your computer. I’ll cover this next time. Then, when your computer does fail beyond repair (Webster’s first rule of computing: all hard drives die eventually), at least it won’t have taken your unfinished novel with it to computer heaven.

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Bonfire of the currencies If the squeeze on your budget hasn’t already motivated you to check drawers, mattresses and other hidden spaces where you might have some money tucked away, now is the time to do it. At the end of September, the Bank of England is withdrawing legal status from the old, paper-based £20 and £50 banknotes. You will no longer be able to pay any bills or shop with them, and there are billions of pounds’ worth of 76 The Oldie August 2022

these notes still in circulation. Until 30th September, you can take paper notes into your bank branch or post office and pay them into an account or possibly swap them for polymer notes. If you miss the deadline, your money is still safe. Many banks and some post offices will continue to allow them to be deposited into UK bank accounts. The Bank of England will always exchange old notes but you will have to post them

at your own risk or queue up at the Bank of England counter in Threadneedle Street in the City of London. Ulster Bank has just introduced a new polymer £50 note, although in Northern Ireland and Scotland only Royal Mint coins count as legal tender. In England and Wales, both coins and Bank of England notes are legal tender. Even so, the Scottish and Northern Irish banks will also withdraw their paper notes at

‘It’s not you. It’s ... oh, who am I kidding? Yes, it’s you’

the end of September, apart from AIB Group, which did so at the end of June. In the last few weeks when the old notes remain legal tender, you need to be extra wary of being tricked with fake ones. The National Crime Agency says the market for counterfeit currency has changed in the past ten years as high-

quality notes can be produced quickly with offset lithographic printing. Crooks will need to use up their stocks of paper-based notes before only polymer ones are accepted. The main reason for switching from paper to polymer notes was to help combat fraud and this has been successful.

Still, a criminal gang nearly got away with flooding £12 million in fake £20 notes onto the high street. Earlier this year, the fourth member of the gang was jailed, following the largest swoop on fake currency in UK history. In January 2019, the Bank of England identified a new counterfeit £20 note in circulation. Some months later, £5.25 million in these notes was found in Beckenham, south-east London. Then a dog-walker stumbled on another £5 million, and notes worth a further £201,000 were found scattered along a railway line in Kent. Around £1.6 million’s worth of the same forged £20 note was already in circulation. And in Bristol, a few months ago, counterfeit money was twice used to pay for electronic goods that had been advertised online. The fraudster turned up in person, paid in fake cash and ran off with the goods. If you are handed what you suspect is counterfeit currency, you must report it to the police. You will be given a receipt but you will not be reimbursed and you will lose your money. The Bank of England website shows you how to identify genuine banknotes.

Literary Lunch

In association with

Tuesday 4th October 2022

At the National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE

Sheila Hancock

on Old Rage. The gripes of wrath from an 89-year-old

Harry Mount

On Et Tu, Brute? The sequel to Amo, Amas, Amat

Melvyn Bragg

On Back in the Day Memoir of his Cumbrian youth

TO BOOK TICKETS email reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call Katherine on 01225 427311 (Mon-Fri 9.30am3pm). The price is £79 for a three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks l Fish and vegetarian options available on advance request l Meet the speakers from 12 noon; lunch at 1pm l Authors speak 2.30 The Oldie August 2022 77

The Razorbill

CARRY AKROYD

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd Seabirds in general have decreased in number by 28 per cent since the 1990s. This decline will undoubtedly be exacerbated by the current avian-flu epidemic. But so far this has not affected the UK and Ireland’s million breeding pairs of guillemots and 180,000 breeding pairs of razorbills. The razorbill (Alca torda), like its sea-cliff neighbours the guillemot and the puffin, is a member of the auk family. ‘Auk’ derives from the Icelandic word alka. Francesca Greenoak (British Birds: Their Folklore, Names and Literature) relates alka and some other of the bird’s names to imitations of its principal call. It is described in Brett Westwood and Stephen Moss’s Tweet of the Day (illustrated by The Oldie’s Carry Akroyd) as ‘the grumbling of an old man with a hangover’. Razorbill was originally its westEngland name, from the Latin radere, ‘to scrape’. The French call it petit pingouin: its upright stance is, like the guillemot’s, penguinesque. The legendarily extinct (since 1852) great auk was a larger – hence fatally flightless – relative of the razorbill. Linear elegance, like tailored piping, is accentuated by a feathered pelt of richly contrasted black and white. This smart appearance applies to both genders – a choice between Fred Astaire and Coco Chanel. It is less gregarious and more fastidious than the neighbouring guillemot, whose incubations on crowded ledges foul their beautiful eggs. By contrast, the razorbill’s plainer, less pointed and even larger egg – proportionally equivalent to a human mother giving birth to a 20lb baby – is, like its plumage, spotlessly clean. For all razorbills’ colonisation, each bird seeks to lay its single egg in a crevice, and hygienically craps over the cliff edge – or a decent distance away from the nest, if nesting under

boulders, as on the Shiant Isles in the Minch. Unlike young puffins, which are left by their parents to find their own way to the sea, young razorbills on cliffs or shore are parentally shepherded. They usually enter the sea at dusk to avoid predators; parents and chicks rain down from the cliffs – rarely to fatal effect – an amazing sight. Parents stay with the fledgling for several weeks. In The Seabird’s Cry, Adam Nicolson describes this momentous event on the boulder-strewn Shiant shore, where males take control: ‘And so on summer afternoons and evenings the boulders rattle with the paternal cry: rraaar rrrrarr… From

hundreds of yards away, you hear them, the extraordinary resonance built into these little bodies, so that the sound drums through them. Their whole being is a voicebox. The fledglings reply, shrill, high and bright, from within the crevices; a pure note, so that it is a duet between rasping father and peeping child, rrrrar-peep, rrrrar-peep, dialoguing across the generations.’ Ronald Lockley (1904-2000), the pioneering ornithologist who in 1927 took a 31-year lease on the Welsh island of Skokholm and founded the first British bird observatory there, brought a razorbill to Buckingham Palace as a pet for the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. It bit him during the presentation. The Oldie August 2022 79

Travel The Gulf ’s new oil paintings

The Middle East has turned petrodollars into art. By Justin Doherty

IONEL SORIN / DELPHOTOS / DPA PICTURE ALLIANCE / ALAMY

any people think of the Arab Gulf states as something of a cultural wasteland, with glitzy Dubai at its centre, full of spivs, grifters, deposed despots and bored housewives. In fact, for some years, a revival of the arts has been underway, as societies are shedding old-fashioned ways and embracing a new kind of modernity. I’ve spent the past 20 years travelling around the ‘new’ Middle East and have observed the cultural shifts in real time. I’ve listened to Arabic opera in the desert, watched taboo-shattering movies in Saudi, and met ultra-violent, basketweaving flower men on the Yemen border. This is a region full of drama and change, with a cultural scene on steroids. Of course there have been noteworthy cultural artefacts produced across the Arabian Gulf for thousands of years. Nabati poetry, recited by the Bedouin, has been a dominant literary tradition for centuries. Instruments such as the oud (lute), qanun (zither), and ney (flute) produce the authentic sound of the Middle East maqam music. Gulf Arabs have painted for ever – Saudi’s rock-art petroglyphs were 80 The Oldie August 2022

carved into desert sandstone in Hail 10,000 years ago. Fast forward to the 21st century and, with the Bedouin firmly settled in palaces and villas, cultural activity raced to keep pace. Today’s Nabati poets compete on TV in a reality show similar to The X Factor, namely Million’s Poet. It all kicked off in the first few years of the new millennium. The generation of rulers who had seen their societies transformed by oil dollars gave way to a young, globally minded gang of modernisers. Unlike their illiterate Bedouin parents, many of these young men and women had been schooled at the best universities in America and Europe. Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the new President of the UAE, spent time at Gordonstoun and Sandhurst. The Saudi Ambassador to the UK was at Eton and Oxford. The modernisers were the first generation to benefit from the vast oil riches their ancestors could not have dreamed of. But they also realised the dangers posed by the tsunami of cash. Oil will run out one day and, before then, oil may cease to be relevant as we pivot to

carbon-free energy. Unearned wealth breeds indolence. And so, starting in around 2005, the Gulf monarchies started to shake themselves out of their torpor and got serious about the post-oil future: big, bold visions for society, management consultants, plans for opening up their countries and the economies. Investment agencies were tasked with looking after the trillions of dollars and transforming economies into new sectors fit for the globalised economy.

Luckily for us, and especially for the 60 million mainly young Arabs living in the Gulf, arts and culture got a look-in. In 2006, Abu Dhabi announced it had done a $1-billion deal with the French to build an outpost of the Louvre, to be followed by a new national museum and a new modern-art Guggenheim. Qatar followed shortly afterwards with its own Museum of Islamic Art and Museum of Modern Art. Football fans attending this year’s World Cup will be thrilled to visit the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum. In Dubai, there was an explosion of private galleries, selling contemporary painting, perfectly sized for big Dubai villas and perfectly priced for the discerning tax-free banker. Galleries that are now familiar names on the international art-fair circuit – the Green Gallery, The Third Line, Meem and XVA – exhibited in trendy warehouse arts districts, and showed their wares at new international arts fairs Art Dubai and Abu Dhabi Art. Auction houses, long used to pocketing sheikhs’ money, recognised that they must do more than simply flog the second-rate Warhols and Giacomettis they couldn’t shift in New York. They began touring the Gulf in earnest, putting on auctions, lectures and swanky parties.

The Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum

The danger with all of Saudi – to petition George V this is that the new and Curzon to recognise his cultural outpouring father’s fledgling country. misses the spot and – no You can see Saudi cinema at different from London the Red Sea Film Festival in or New York – becomes Jeddah in December. a publicly funded benefit The rock star of Saudi for trendy elites. The job contemporary art is of embedding the new Abdulnasser Gharem. wave of culture in the A former army officer, region fell to a private, Gharem has made a career well-funded from needling authority and philanthropic Salvator Mundi (1499-1510) poking at social assumptions. foundation, the Abu His thoughtful and Dhabi Music and Arts Foundation provocative artworks include (ADMAF). Message/Messenger which sold for Founded by Huda Alkhamis Kanoo almost $1 million, making him the 25 years ago, the foundation is on a mission highest-selling living Gulf artist. to open up music and the arts to a new At Art Basel in 2019 he exhibited an generation of Gulf Arab, getting music immersive torture chamber, complete onto school curricula, running festivals, with surgical scalpels on a trolley – a supporting artists and organising not-so-subtle reference to the competitions. ADMAF runs the biggest dismemberment of the journalist Jamal student art prize in the region, and an Khashoggi the previous year, by agents of annual festival that hosts many of the the Saudi government, allegedly at the world’s top orchestras and performers. behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin The Saudis arrived slightly late to the Salman of Saudi Arabia. party. With a population of 35 million, it Many people refuse to give Gulf dwarfs the city states of Qatar, Dubai and culture the time of day, convinced that Abu Dhabi. This global behemoth is now every mention of Gulf countries must be ploughing its own cultural furrow. In qualified by condemnation of their 2018, the Saudis got rid of the religious human-rights record. This is a disservice police and, in an instant, rolled back to millions of Saudis, Emiratis, Kuwaitis 40 years of Wahabbist proscription of and Qataris who, through no fault of music, dancing and the arts. their own, were prevented until recently Gone were men with long beards and from participating fully in a flourishing sticks. In came raves in the desert, Lionel cultural life. Richie and Saudi’s art fair Desert X. The Saudis bought Salvator Mundi, Saudi opened its first cinemas in the Leonardo da Vinci of Christ, in 2017 2018. Saudi film-makers have talent for $450 million. Questions still rage and money. Wadjda (2012), written and about its authenticity. Another Leonardo, directed by by Haifa Mansour, is the La Belle Ferronnière, was lent to the delightful story of a little girl keen to Louvre Abu Dhabi by the French in 2017. learn to ride a bike, battling against No review of the arts across the Gulf is the patriarchal society she’s growing complete without a mention of Sharjah. up in. Born a King (2019) tells the This small, unspoilt Emirate is a sort of story of young Prince Faisal, sent by dormitory satellite to Dubai. The ruling his father Ibn Saud – the founder of Al Qasimi family has art-collecting in its blood and the place boasts many good museums, a well-respected biennale and the Barjeel Art Foundation, a collection of over a thousand works of modern Arab art. You don’t even have to fork out the The Louvre Abu £600 it costs to fly to the Gulf to enjoy Dhabi, France’s these cultural gems. They will come to largest cultural you. In May this year, the London project abroad, Symphony Orchestra performed the opened in 2017 Fifth Symphony of Emirati wunderkind composer Mohammed Fairouz. With the world turned upside down by conflict and in these challenging and uncertain times, it is brilliant to see such a massive flowering of arts and culture in a region so poorly understood. The Oldie August 2022 81

Overlooked Britain

The M25 – London’s grand circle lucinda lambton Next time you’re stuck on the motorway, rejoice in the necklace of jewels strung around the capital

Egham’s Loire château: Royal Holloway College (1886), Surrey, by William Henry Crossland, inspired by the Château de Chambord

‘There is a necklace of jewels that is strung around London – otherwise known as the M25.’ BRAVO! I wrote that sentence many years ago and can proudly say that I have not written a better one since. That motorway, which causes such mayhem and misery to so many, is surrounded by a wealth of historical and architectural diversions. At Egham in Surrey, a profusion of pinnacled and pepperpotted spires and towers rears into the sky, along with domes, fanciful chimneys and finials, soaring ebulliently from the trees, giving the M25 a quite stupendous skyline. It is Royal Holloway College, a gargantuan château of Portland stone and ‘flaming red brick’. According to one contemporary ardent admirer, it ‘fairly scorched the eye’ when it was built between 1879 and 1887 by William Crossland for Thomas Holloway. When one is faced with its vivid vastness, there seems to be no other 82 The Oldie August 2022

building as bright and as big – 550 feet by 376 feet – in the whole wide world. Designed to attract the attention of the passing public on the railways, it reigns triumphant over the speeding motorway. Thomas Holloway, ‘one of the wonders of the 19th century’, made millions with his ‘healing genius’ for inventing all-purpose pills and ointments. So all-purpose were his remedies that one Irish farmer claimed not only to have regained the use of all his limbs, his sight and his hearing but also to have been relieved from pains that had plagued him for 20 years. Holloway’s genius in fact lay in his rhetoric rather than in the effectiveness of his remedies. He became a philanthropist, always claiming to have worked harder spending his money than in making it. Nearby there is yet further endorsement of his excellence with the Holloway Sanatorium. It was built as a hospital for ‘the insane of the middle

classes … and with grounds … equal to those at the Crystal Palace’. Today, it has transmogrified into an ‘exclusive housing development’. Gridlocked motorists should give three hearty cheers nevertheless for the preservation of its Franco-Flemish, Gothic forms, crowstepped gables and great tower, modelled on the Cloth Hall at Ypres. Eight miles to the south, near Cobham, we find Silvermere Haven, a pet cemetery with many hundreds of melancholy epitaphs. There are tombs for the two rats Gladstone and Disraeli. And what sad delight to see ‘Gone for Long Walkies’ emblazoned on a gravestone. A mere mile from here across the fields at Chaldon in Surrey, between exits 6 and 7, lies the late-12th- and early-13th-century church of St Peter and St Paul. Reaching it by a narrow-as-yourcar road, which presents a particularly rural picture, we find its little flint body and wooden spire.

TOPOGRAPHICAL COLLECTION / ROBERTHARDING / ANTIQUA PRINT GALLERY / ALAMY

Above: Plan for Copt Hall, Essex, drawn in 1735. Left: Temple Bar in Theobalds Park, Hertfordshire, 1926. It was returned to London in 2003

It shelters the rarest wall painting in Europe, dating from 1200 and painted in the subtlest of colours. It depicts some of the most gruesome scenes imaginable. The Last Judgement is as grisly as it is glorious. Little naked bodies fearfully climb up the Ladder of Salvation through Hell and Purgatory to Christ amidst the clouds on high. Lust is represented by a man and a woman being embraced by the devil. Envy is a bald-pated figure longing for another’s lustrous locks. Sweeping over the elegant lines of the Dartford Bridge, I am drawn down the Thames to Gravesend – where Pocahontas lies buried. She was my

seven-times-great-grandmother and it was thanks to her support in the early17th century that the early English settlers in America were able to survive. Woe betide the Disney version today! As you speed round the full circle of the M25, hoot a salute to honour those buried on either side. Delius the composer, as well as his champion Sir Thomas Beecham and the pianist Eileen Joyce are buried in St Peter’s Churchyard at Limpsfield, Surrey. Nearby, at West Horsley, ponder the remains of the executed Sir Walter Raleigh’s head, which lies beneath the floor of St Mary’s Church. When his body

was buried in St Margaret’s, Westminster, his desolate wife had his head embalmed and kept it with her – in a red leather bag – until the day she died. St Michael’s Church in St Albans harbours the remains of Sir Francis Bacon, the philosopher whose wisdom, it was said, ‘was too far advanced of the time to be palatable’. It was this very advanced wisdom that brought about his demise in 1626: determined on experimenting with his notion of freezing food, he scrabbled about in the snow on Highgate Hill with a chicken carcass and caught a chill, then perished from bronchitis. According to legend, King Harold (as in the Battle of Hastings) is buried at Waltham Abbey, Essex. A royal connection of a harrowing kind lingers among the ruins of the Dominican priory at Kings Langley in Hertfordshire. Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, lies there. It was thanks to his doubtful connection with Edward II that in 1327 the King was hideously done to death with a red-hot poker at Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire. It was said that his screams were audible two miles away. A far happier, peacefully perfect spot is the little Quaker meeting house at Jordans, the burial place of William Penn, august Quaker and founder of Pennsylvania. When the apple trees are in full blossom and the greensward glints in this cosily English scene, it is strange indeed to think of the American memorial to the man, which has perched high on the dome of Philadelphia’s City Hall since the 1890s. Death’s roll-call around the M25 never ends. The remains of Anthony Hope, author of The Prisoner of Zenda, lie at Leatherhead. Those of Martin Secker – founder of Secker and Warburg, the first publishers of D H Lawrence – lie in Iver, Buckinghamshire. Most imposing of all is Wyatt’s monument to the poet Thomas Gray at Stoke Poges nearby. Two of the grandest and greatest of all these wonders have included – temporarily, from 1880 until 2003, when it was returned to its original City of London location – the Temple Bar Gatehouse, designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1672, and Copt Hall, whose late-19th-century gardens once swept into the Essex countryside. A Tudor house stood proud on this spot, where – joy of joys – A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first performed. Next time you’re trapped in the motorway traffic on the M25, hold hard and remember the glories strung about it – a dazzling necklace of jewels indeed. The Oldie August 2022 83

On the Road

Around the world with Maggie Former Telegraph editor Charles Moore toured the globe to write his epic Margaret Thatcher biography. By Louise Flind

Is there anything you can’t leave home without? A book and a pen. Is there something you really miss? The right cup of tea. I know how to make the tea I want at home. I don’t like tea bags. Do you travel light? I’ve got better. I used to be terrible. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? My father was against holidays in Britain – so very early he introduced us to Continental holidays. In his view, a holiday was eating well and doing a lot of culture – quite a tiring combination. He would take you into a church or a castle and give you a long talk about the history when you were seven. Is it a relief no longer having the Thatcher biography in your life? Yes, it is. What did you think of her? Luckily, she’s a fascinating biographical subject. It’s very interesting to examine somebody who’s so unusual and who never examined herself. Where did you travel to for the Thatcher biography? Mainly the US, the archives in Paris and round England. I interviewed 600 people. What do you miss most about not being the Daily Telegraph editor any more? The camaraderie and skulduggery of journalism. What’s more enjoyable – being an editor or being a writer? I couldn’t have been a writer if I hadn’t been an editor. I wouldn’t have had the confidence to write a book without learning how the big world works by being in it.

Are you glad not to commute from Etchingham in East Sussex to London any more? Very. What’s your favourite hunting country? I’ve hunted with about 40 packs and probably the best hunting nowadays is in the West Country. And your favourite part of Sussex? East Sussex: Weald, not Downs, because it’s more obscure. Has Sussex changed much since you were a boy? Ten miles in each direction from us has not been dramatically altered. How badly were you affected by the Sussex storms last winter? Very badly. My mother, who’s seven miles away, was out of heat and light for five days and of water for one day – no good when you’re disabled and 90. Where do you go abroad? Now, because of grandchildren, dogs and time, France, Italy or Portugal. I once did a lovely, rather dangerous riding safari with Tristan Voorspuy, who was later murdered [in Kenya in 2017]. I’m always keen for the Telegraph to send me to a tricky country for journalistic reasons. What is your favourite room in the House of Lords? The chamber. Do you mind your Lord Snooty nickname? No [he says with a giggle]. What was your maiden speech in the House of Lords this year about? An election bill, which was about trying to tighten up on election fraud. As a Catholic convert, do you go

to church regularly? Every Sunday. Mass in foreign countries is an added pleasure of travel. Where did you go on your honeymoon? Umbria, in September – truffles. Do you stay in a hotel or an apartment? I like good hotels – not grand hotels. Are you brave with different food abroad? My wife and I are both very keen on good food, especially what others used to call ‘foreign muck’. Strangest thing you’ve ever eaten? Donkey, which I ate by mistake in Bologna. Actually, it was extremely nice. Do you have a go at the local language? I’m bad but, having done Latin, I taught myself some Italian and Spanish. I can read a newspaper in Italian and talk to a waiter –and speak schoolboy French. What is the strangest place you’ve ever slept in – while being away? Getting out of Iraq during the war, I hitched a lift on a military plane. In total darkness near the airport, our driver panicked, thinking he might get shot, and started weaving all over the place. Luckily, the photographer was experienced, jumped out and shouted, ‘Western media.’ Then we could discern a whole load of guns pointing at us. It was the American forces, who thought we were a car bomb. I slept on the ground in the airport with the US Cavalry. Do you like coming home? Yes. You see your home in a different way each time. What are your top travelling tips? Footwear is the most important thing, and headwear if it’s very hot or very wet, and earplugs. Charles Moore’s Margaret Thatcher: Herself Alone (Penguin) is out now The Oldie August 2022 85

Taking a Walk

Led through the streets of east London… patrick barkham

GARY WING

I’ve always resisted guided walks, because they’re what tourists do. Especially in Spitalfields, just east of the City of London, where I lived 20 years ago. Then, as now, most guided walks consisted of gaggles of holidaymakers goggling at Jack the Ripper fables. This, though, was a guided East End ramble with a difference. Within seconds of meeting our guide, the enigmatic blogger known only as the Gentle Author (TGA), I felt my prejudices blow away like litter on the pavement. ‘We’re going time travelling and this is how we’re going to do it,’ said TGA, standing outside Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields. He removed a talisman from around his neck to reveal his mother’s wedding ring, his grandmother’s wedding ring, half-acrown from Elizabeth I and a Roman coin he bought from a grave-robber, worn for good luck two millennia ago. ‘Before Spitalfields was anything, it was a cemetery,’ TGA explained, and we were off. Our guide walked briskly ahead, after filling our heads with pictures of this busy inner-city neighbourhood in the 12th century,

when it was marshland beyond the City walls. Rough sleepers were shunted to the homeless shelter of Spital. TGA, a local resident since 1981, began telling the stories of neighbours past and present on his blog more than a decade ago. His guided walks are new. In the flesh, TGA is an even better storyteller, a magician of social history, who not only brings the past alive but reanimates the present. We see how today’s travails would be grimly – or amusingly – familiar to our ancestors. Our first stop is outside a building with ‘Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor 1902’ engraved above its doors. This area, then known as Little Jerusalem, was filled with exiles fleeing Russian violence in what is now Ukraine. Fishing the first of many laminated photos from a leather satchel, TGA told of four-year-old Harry from Ukraine, whose mother lied to the authorities about having a second child to obtain extra food tokens. Smelling a rat, the official asked Harry what his little sister was called. ‘Rosie,’ he deftly replied. From that moment, Harry Landis became an actor, growing up to take the

lead role in The Kitchen (1957) by Arnold Wesker, another citizen of Spitalfields. We twist through tiny streets, toxicscented wheelie bins enlivening stories of poverty, ancient and modern. We learn the origin of ‘tenterhooks’ and ‘refugee’, brought by the Huguenots, the Protestant silk weavers who fled persecution in 17thcentury France. We also discover recently minted words such as ‘façadism’. TGA illustrates this by showing us a decorative brick frontage – all that remains of a 19th-century pub, behind which there are shoddy, ugly 21st-century student flats. A theme emerged, pertinent to all London. Because new-builds are VAT-free but the tax is levied on refurbs, ‘There’s a financial imperative to destroy old buildings,’ explained TGA. At first, TGA was avowedly apolitical, but he’s been sucked into campaigns to save what is still a resolutely mixed neighbourhood of homes and small businesses from being swallowed by the City’s concrete-and-glass conquest. ‘Every old building in Spitalfields is left only because there was a fight over it that was won,’ said TGA as we marvelled at what remained of Elder Street, possibly the prettiest Georgian street in London. Behind it, 86 per cent of the fabric of a ‘conservation area’ is being destroyed by new development. This is not just an architectural tour but a walk where people are constantly present. Photographs whipped out of TGA’s satchel include everyone from Indian freedom fighter and assassin Udham Singh to artist Tracey Emin. We end, without a single mention of the Ripper, at TGA’s home, for tea and cake, baked to a 1720 recipe. As I wander away, I feel humbled by how ignorant I was as a resident of Spitalfields. How enlightened I have become as a tourist, realising that every street in every city holds a marvellous fund of stories, if only we stop, sniff and listen. Spitalfields tour (two hours) www.thegentleauthorstours.com The Oldie August 2022 87

Genius crossword 416 el sereno Across 1 & 4 Food? - providing it for defence possibly … (6,6) 4 See 1 8 & 13... and, accepting I understand deliveries will be tasty morsels (7,5) 9 Sailors must be surrounded by those angry insects (7) 11 Piece rate adjusted by day will give decrease in value (10) 12 Hit one hundred thousand (4) 13 See 8 14 Immediately and with fatal consequences holding court (8) 16 A supporter employing nurse for delegate (8) 18 Attitude adopted by jet-set hostesses (5) 20 Became aware of misery surrounding king (4) 21 Need review into writer’s bad spelling (5,5) 23 Struggle to accept northern term for old (7) 24 Explicit mostly about old church organ part (7) 25 Tries tucking in top of trouser suit (6) 26 A second hearing should release one of the stars (6)

Down 1 Stick around love boat (5) 2 A breather from riots breaking out in the Netherlands (7) 3 Worried, seeing driver’s head underneath train (9) 5 Australia working with energy and gas (5) 6 Fundamentalist may be cooler - and a jerk! (7) 7 Snares fish caught in new nets (9) 10 Burden on reserve’s attachment to bike (9) 13 A bit loth to change on hot rocky outcrop (9) 15 Impressive thing put up to protect rise of iron bonds (4,5) 17 Complex vote in Rwanda without magic stick (7) 19 Girl from hospital featuring in Sun, perhaps? (7) 21 Clever - avoiding right stretch of coastline (5) 22 Perfect cards handed out by one (5)

How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. With regret, owing to the coronavirus epidemic we are temporarily unable to accept postal entries. Normal procedure will be restored as soon as possible. Deadline: 24th August 2022. We do not sell or share your data with third parties. First prize is The Chambers Thesaurus and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15. NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.

Moron crossword 416 Across 1 Irish police (5) 4 Suckle; entertain (5) 8 Dispirited (3) 9 Countless (11) 10 Ban (7) 12 Minimum (5) 13 Burden (with) (6) 14 Talkative (6) 17 Enthusiastic (5) 19 Peeved (7) 21 Announcing publicly, promoting (11) 23 Atmosphere, appearance (3) 24 Old-fashioned (5) 25 Hotel client (5)

Genius 414 solution Down 1 Cunning, trickery (5) 2 Managed (3) 3 Senior naval officer (7) 4 Restricted (of opening) (6) 5 Rise up (against) (5) 6 Smartly (9) 7 Rapidly (7) 11 Personal minder (9) 13 Not ordinary or common (7) 15 Searching (7) 16 Divine, holy (6) 18 Metal pin or bolt (5) 20 Finger or toe (5) 22 Form of water (3)

Winner: Alan Pink, Crowhurst, Battle, East Sussex Runners-up: Bill Goodge, Birchington, Kent; Linda Davenport, Tattenhall, Chester

Moron 414 solution: Across: 1 Aisle, 4 Beeb, 7 Load (I’ll be blowed), 8 Renounce, 9 Liability, 10 Elk, 12 Shorts, 14 Pronto, 16 Try, 18 Committee, 21 Homespun, 22 Path, 23 Byre, 24 Title. Down: 1 Abolish, 2 Sideburn, 3 Enrol, 4 Blue, 5 Excel, 6 Instep, 11 Soft spot, 13 Sloppy, 15 Theatre, 17 Roomy, 19 Monet, 20 Cede. The Oldie August 2022 89

Competition TESSA CASTRO A successful bridge player will focus not merely on what the other players did, but also on what they didn’t do. Sophie Ashton of Sydney recalled what East didn’t do in the auction. This helped her to capitalise on a misdefence and so make Four Spades. Dealer West Neither Vulnerable

West ♠ K7 ♥ A8643 ♦ 85 ♣ KJ54

North ♠ Q J 10 8 ♥ J9 ♦ A 10 7 6 ♣ Q 10 7 South ♠ A952 ♥ Q 10 2 ♦ KQ42 ♣ A6

East ♠ 643 ♥ K75 ♦ J93 ♣ 9832

The bidding South 1 NT(1) 2♠ 4♠

West 1♥ Pass Pass All pass

North Pass 2 ♣(2) 3♠

East Pass Pass Pass

(1) In the protective (aka ‘cheat’) seat, the One Notrump overcall shows about 11-16 points. (2) Stayman, asking for four-card majors. West had a tricky opening lead and selected the ace of hearts – perhaps he could give his partner a ruff. East signalled encouragement by playing the seven, and West continued with the three of hearts to East’s king. At trick three, East switched ‘safely’ to a spade, and the Australian declarer had her chance. Here is the key point. East did not respond to West’s one-heart opener, so presumably held fewer than six high-card points. East had turned up with the king of hearts, so could not hold a black-suit king. Declarer rose with the ace of spades, hoping West’s king was a singleton. West’s king did not fall, but declarer was not doomed. Unblocking dummy’s ten of spades, she cashed the king-queen of diamonds (crucially removing West’s diamonds) and led the queen of hearts, carefully ruffing in dummy (with the jack) in case East was out of hearts and could ruff. The scene was set. At trick seven, declarer exited with dummy’s queen of spades. West won the now-bare king, but was endplayed. If he led a club, declarer could avoid a loser by rising with dummy’s queen. In practice, West led a fourth heart. No good either – declarer ruffed with dummy’s eight of spades and shed the club loser from hand. All that remained was to cross to the ace of clubs, draw East’s last trump and cash diamonds. Game made. ‘Couldn’t you have switched to a club at trick three?’ asked West disappointedly. ‘I did lead my lowest heart (as a suitpreference signal), you know.’ ANDREW ROBSON

IN COMPETITION NO 282 you were invited to write a poem with the title Unpacking. Basil Ransome-Davies, in a poem on the wars between sonic (prettysounding) and confessional poets, made me laugh with the couplet ‘Confessionals unpack their hearts, / Like Hamlet or repentant tarts.’ Wally Smith began promisingly: ‘Unpacking the tent was quite an event’. Martin Elster wrote of Jackie and her boyfriend, Jack, who ‘sleep on a deserted sidewalk / (Not in any place where I’d walk)’. Ted Lane imaginatively took on the unpacking of a fritillary from its chrysalis. Commiserations to them and to Katie Mallett, Peter Wyllie, Mike Morrison and Martin Brown, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of the word-packed Chambers Thesaurus going to Heather Uebel. Shirts on top – that awful check – I doubt Even charity shops would take. I think nowt To his trousers either, so loud, I’ve never liked His taste in clothes. When we hiked Up Snowdon even multi-hued climbers cringed. Next, pants and socks. How he whinged At attempts to ditch the ones with holes. Slippers now; oh strewth, spare inner soles. At bottom cough sweets, Strepsils, Elastoplast. Died-in-the-wool hypochondriac to the last. Well, that was one short break. I’d looked forward to Our hols and then the selfish idiot threw A tantrum by the river. Couldn’t swim. Can’t say I’m sad to see the back of him. Heather Uebel That’s it! I’m done! Packed each of eighty years Into a memory that’s fit to burst. My brain’s retrieval system chugs more slowly now; Each sought-for item needs to be coerced, Unpacked from some far wrinkly cranial recess, To that part where the brain and mouth collide. But somehow the cerebral baggagehandlers Show signs of being otherwise occupied, And the memories I’m desperate to articulate Don’t make it to the ‘Arrivals’ carousel. And though they might well turn up sometime later, By then the bucket’s long since left the well.

And whether it’s a tale to share with grandkids, Or what colour bins need to go out today, The seemingly recalcitrant baggagehandlers Are well aware they’ll have the final say. Con Connell How neatly packed the outward case – but not, Alas, the tired home-bound travelling bags. A disarrangement, total loss of plot, As earlier, ordered, good intention flags. Holiday hopefulness is quite worn through And all that’s left’s the desperate need to squeeze More or less everything, somehow, in to A jumbled screwed-up messiness like these. Upending on the floor (the only way) Reveals how fashion’s cool and casual look Has turned to creased and crumpled disarray. A sandal dips into a half-read book. A sun-bleached swimsuit and a flip-flop lie Tangled like high-tide debris, and no hope Of solving the eternal question: why The toothbrush always rubs against the soap. D A Prince Our joint journey, each of us carrying The imponderable baggage of our pasts, Our mutually unknown, unshared pasts. But the past is what the present is about For, imperceptibly, as time passes, Past and present become a continuum; And our belongings from the years BM (Before marriage!) that were folded away In our metaphorical suitcases Have become, somehow, common property – Not that they were so ‘private’ in the first place! So here we are, after all these years, still In the continuing present: retired Residents in the Grand Hotel of life, Baggage unpacked – all of it, now, our own! I White COMPETITION No 284 You are invited to write a poem called Difficult Delivery, in any sense. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@ theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 284’, by 25th August. The Oldie August 2022 91

Ed McLachlan

‘Are you sure you went to the right sperm bank?’

‘He didn’t want to go on holiday with his family – so they took the dog instead’

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The Oldie August 2022 97

Ask Virginia

virginia ironside Older lady seeks gigolo

I’ve read all the publicity around Emma Thompson’s film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande and gather it’s about an older woman finding a young man who teaches her how to have an orgasm. I’ve never had an orgasm in my life and I’d love to experience good sex before it’s too late. I’m 68. Like Emma in the film, I’m a widow and I’ve got enough money to hire someone to help me. But can you tell me where on earth I can find such a man? Name and address supplied I’m afraid there’s no reputable Royal Guild of Male Pleasurers. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t go trawling around escort agencies asking if they’ve got anyone who could help. You could end up with the weirdest and most abusive creep or be open to all kinds of blackmail attempts. Remember this film is a fantasy, and the man involved is exceptionally kind and emotionally intelligent. The first thing to find is a very nice, kind, single man. A friend. If you make it clear you aren’t after long-term commitment, he might be interested in helping you. (Although in my experience a lot of men are in a similar position to you: although they’re able to orgasm, they’ve never experienced the wonderfulness of good sex, let alone learned how to help a woman reach sexual satisfaction.) There are dozens of books on the market that could outline the basic mechanics. But, without trust, kindness and, dare I say it, love, or at the very least deep affection, your chances of enjoying a brilliant sex life are not very high. You could try finding a reputable psychosexual therapist – ask your doctor to recommend one, or find one yourself via the Institute of Pyschosexual Medicine (ipm.org.uk) – who might be able to put you on a more sexually fulfilled path.

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98 The Oldie August 2022

I want to feed the birds

My husband and I are moving house in six months and I am anxious about leaving all the local cats and foxes and strays I’ve been feeding over the years. There are seven cats who depend on me, not to mention a family of foxes – and that’s not counting the birds. I feel terrible about just leaving them – I want to come back to see they’re OK, but my husband says we must just harden our hearts, leave them and not feed any strays in our new home. Because, for a start, it’s becoming far too expensive. Do you have any ideas? Gilly, Enfield This is the dark underbelly of being a lady bountiful. You foster such dependence that the poor wildlife may not know how to cope without you. There’s enough time for you to start cutting the food down gradually, leaving less and less out every day until the animals simply stop coming. They will slowly find other sources of food. And if you find this too difficult, contact Mayhew (themayhew.org), an animal welfare charity, who may be able to trap the cats and eventually find them good homes. They could certainly advise you; you can’t be the first animal-lover to face this predicament. Or if you have a WhatsApp group in your area, you might be able to find someone nearby who could take over. And, perhaps, if any particular cat looks too wretched, could you think of taking it with you?

Let them eat Granny’s cake

We have brought up our children, aged six and nine, to eat wholesome food – no, not the goat yoghurt and quinoa type, but what is generally regarded as good nutrition.

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Unfortunately, when they go to visit their widowed grandmother, she stuffs them with everything we wish to avoid – crisps, sweets, chicken nuggets and all kinds of processed food. Now they are getting grumpy and rejecting the food we give them, saying, ‘Why can’t we have food like what Grandma gives us?’ and having temper outbursts. We have tried to remonstrate with Grandma, but she pooh-poohs the idea, saying, ‘Give the children what they want, not all this faddy rubbish they don’t like.’ We don’t want to stop them seeing Grandma, because she dotes on them and is still grieving for her late husband. We are at a loss as to what to do. Can you advise? A G, Sheringham, Norfolk The odd day of what is scathingly known as ‘junk food’ (despite a lot of it being perfectly nutritious) is not going to do your children any harm. And this difference is a very good lesson for them to learn – that there is home and there is ‘Granny’s house’. There must be lots of things that their granny insists on that perhaps you are lax about – good manners, perhaps? She may feed them crisps but she might also insist they say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, wash their hands after going to the loo, and shake hands with visitors. And it’s a lesson for you to learn, too – that you can’t control your children’s every move. A day or so of treats isn’t going to kill them, and a day of being thoroughly spoiled by someone who loves them to bits is going to benefit them for ever. Their grandmother, too, now she’s widowed, is desperate for someone to love and spoil. Do try to be more kind and relaxed about all this.

Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.

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The Oldie magazine - August 2022 - issue 416

Articles inside

Drink Bill Knott

On the Road: Charles Moore

Taking a Walk: East End

Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Overlooked Britain London’s grand circle, the

Art in the Middle East

Golden Oldies

Bird of the Month: Razorbill